SKY SURVEYORS FIND THE MOST DISTANT OBJECT EVER DETECTED The report by James Glanz, informs us that astronomers working on a vast survey of the heavens, have discovered the most distant object ever detected, a fiery, reddish dot called a quasar that emitted its light less than a billion years after the universe was born. But in a measure of how efficiently telescopes have begun plumbing the deepest reaches of the cosmos, astronomers on the …showed first 75 words of 951 total…

…showed last 75 words of 951 total…extremely dim objects that may turn out to be even more distant than the new quasar, but most astronomers believe that those findings remain uncertain. Dr. Charles Steidel, a Caltech astronomer, said the wide coverage of surveys like the Sloan was changing the way astronomy is done. "These large surveys are opening a new area of science where you can actually study the physics of things we didn't even know existed before," Dr. Steidel said.