The new work focuses instead on cold, dense masses of gas that have markedly less random motion, and which emit their radiation in the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The obvious solution getting people to breathe hydrogen cannot work either, because a lungful of hydrogen gas, being less dense than water, contains less hydrogen, and so would produce too weak an image.
The cosmos was born in the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago, and the first stars in the universe are thought to have lit up about 100 million years afterward, when gas finally gathered in clumps dense enough to collapse under their own gravity and ignite nuclear fusion.