Universe's First Stars Detected? Get the Facts.

An illustration shows what the earliest stars in the universe might have looked like. Stars are our constant companions in the night sky, but seas of twinkling lights weren't always a feature of the cosmos. Now, scientists peering back into deep time suggest that the earliest stars didn't turn on until about 180 million years after the big bang, when the universe as we know it exploded into existence. For decades, teams of scientists have been chasing--in fact, racing--to detect the signatures of these first stars. The new detection, from a project called EDGES, is in the form of a radio signal triggered when light from those stars began interacting with the hydrogen gas that filled primordial empty space.