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From Nature:听Astronomers have for the first time spotted long-sought signals of light from the earliest stars ever to form in the Universe 鈥� around 180 million years after the Big Bang.

The signal is a fingerprint left on background radiation by hydrogen that absorbed some of this primordial light. The evidence hints that the gas that made up the early Universe was colder than predicted. This, physicists say, is a possible sign of dark matter鈥檚 influence. If confirmed, the discovery could mark the first time that dark matter has been detected through anything other than its gravitational effects.

鈥淭his is the first time we鈥檝e seen any signal from this early in the Universe, aside from the afterglow of the Big Bang,鈥� says Judd Bowman, an astronomer at Arizona State University in Tempe who led the work, which is published in听Nature听on 28 February. 鈥淚f it鈥檚 true, this is major news,鈥� says Saleem Zaroubi, a cosmologist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Other teams will need to confirm the signal but, so far, the finding seems to be robust, he says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 very exciting stuff. This is a period in the Universe鈥檚 history we know very little about.鈥�