Echoes of the universe’s fiery formation soon after the Big Bang have been captured by a new European spacecraft.

The Planck space telescope detected radiation from a previously invisible population of galaxies some 12 billion light years away.

Shrouded in obscuring dust, they are the furnaces in which the elements of today’s universe were forged less than two billion years after the dawn of creation.

Within them stars are forming at rates 10 to 1,000 times higher than in our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

The telescope, which began its mission in August 2009, is designed to look at “cold” parts of the universe which are not easy to detect.

Rather than capturing images of stars and galaxies, it finds evidence of the raw material from which the universe is made.