The Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies (BoRG) survey
  Until now, investigating the early stages of galaxy formation has been
primarily the realm of theoretical modeling and computer simulations, which
require many physical ingredients and are challenging to test observationally.
However, the latest Hubble Space Telescope observations in the near infrared
are shedding new light on the properties of galaxies within the first billion
years after the Big Bang, including our recent discovery of the most distant
proto-cluster of galaxies at redshift z~8. Here, I compare predictions from
models of primordial and metal-enriched star formation during the dark ages
with the latest Hubble observations of galaxies during the epoch of
reionization. I focus in particular on the luminosity function and on galaxy
clustering as measured from our Hubble Space Telescope Brightest of Reionizing
Galaxies (BoRG) survey. BoRG has the largest area coverage to find luminous and
rare z~8 sources that are among the first galaxies to have formed in the
Universe.
