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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 …

…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.