A great piece at the New York Times by Dennis Overbye looks at the latest research from the Hubble Space Telescope’s new Wide Field Camera 3, which is recording images from a time ever closer to the beginning of the universe itself: With Updated Hubble Telescope, Reaching Farther Back in Time.

Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF TeamAstronomers announced in a series of papers over the fall and in a news conference last week that Hubble had recorded images of the earliest and most distant galaxies ever seen, blurry specks of light that burned brightly only 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang.

The specks are clouds only one-twentieth the size of the Milky Way galaxy and only 1 percent of its mass, and seem to show the lingering effects of the first generation of stars to form in the universe in that they get bluer the farther back you go in time.

The new galaxies, along with other recent discoveries like the violent supernova explosion of a star only 620 million years after the Big Bang, take astronomers deep into a period of cosmic history known as the dark ages, which has been little explored. It was then that stars and galaxies were starting to light up vigorously in larger and larger numbers and that a fog of hydrogen that had enveloped space after the Big Bang fires had cooled mysteriously dissipated.

“These are the seeds of the great galaxies of today,” said Garth Illingworth of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who discussed the new galaxies last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington. “We are pushing Hubble to the limit to find these objects.”

Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology, one of many astronomers who have been working with the observations, said, “We’re reaching the beginning where galaxies formed for the first time.”