Back to (Near) the Beginning: Galactic springtime

In their quest to capture ever-earlier moments of cosmic history, astronomers have found some of the first galaxies, a new study suggests.

EARLY LIGHT. These two extremely remote galaxies, imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, are among a group recently shown to be in the first burst of star formation. NASA

The researchers used infrared and visible-light observations to compare the properties of two previously identified sets of distant objects: about 21 galaxies viewed as they appeared about 1.2