(CNN) Scientists have detected traces of the earliest light in the universe thought to emanate from the first stars formed after the Big Bang, billions of years ago.

The new report, published in Nature on February 28, said researchers found the "fingerprint" of the universe's first light as background radiation left on hydrogen.

"This is the first time we've seen any signal from this early in the Universe, aside from the afterglow of the Big Bang," Judd Bowman, an astronomer at Arizona State University who led the work, said in a statement.

Following the Big Bang, physicists believe there was only darkness in the universe for about 180 million years, a period known by scientists as Cosmic "Dark Ages."

As the universe expanded, the soup of ionized plasma created by the Big Bang slowly began to cool and form neutral hydrogen atoms, say physicists. Eventually these were pulled together by gravity and ignited to form stars.

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