images of the early cosmos were released Tuesday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society at National Harbor.

This is not the first time that the Hubble, in its third decade of operation, has taken a "deep field" look at the universe, training its gaze on a tiny spot and holding it there to collect the ancient light. But a new observation campaign, dubbed the Frontier Fields, supplements Hubble time with data from the Spitzer, which observes in infrared, and another space telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

The new campaign exploits a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. This is an opportunistic maneuver that draws inspiration from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, which describes how gravity curves the fabric of space and time.

In the foreground of one newbecome more precise in the past few years with new data from space telescopes. Theorists believe it took about 400 million years for the first stars to ignite and the first galaxies to form. The Hubble can't see quite that deeply in time and space, but the earliest galaxy-forming epoch is a target for NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in 2018.

The universe in its youth was going through a blue period, because the stars were blue, just like the young, hot stars we see in the constellation Orion, said Garth Illingworth, professor of astronomy at the University of California at Santa Cruz and one of the scientists involved in the new research.

In telescopes, these young galaxies look red, because their light has been stretched out