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 project, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, said they could break their own record within days or weeks as their telescope continued its sweep across the sky.

What made the work extraordinary, according to them, was the nearly simultaneous discovery of dozens of other quasars that are nearly as distant, allowing scientists to begin piecing together a kind of census of regions of the universe that were once entirely inaccessible. "This one is a spectacularly distant object," said Dr. Richard Ellis, an astrophysicist at the California Institute of Technology who is not a member of the Sloan survey. Dr. Ellis added, "I'm not so impressed that they've broken the record but that, routinely, they are finding these objects."

Quasars, mysterious objects that blaze with the energy of h

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an $80 million, five-year census of the heavens involving institutions in the United States, Europe and Japan. The survey, which relies on an automated telescope at Apache Point, N.M., will eventually blanket half of the northern sky and collect hundreds of millions of galaxies and individual stars as well as quasars and other celestial oddballs. Astrophysicists believe that black holes, or supermassive, collapsed objects, form in the center of most galaxies. The black holes' terrific gravitational force probably sucks in gas and dust swirling within young galaxies. As the material plunges into the black holes, it emits copious amounts of energy in the form of light, which are observed as quasars.

undreds of billions of suns in the early universe, are interesting cosmic oddities in themselves, he said. Given their brilliance, they can serve as beacons to illuminate the gas and other material in the billions of light years between Earth and the early universe. Most cosmologists believe that the universe was born about 13 billion years ago in the Big Bang explosion and that after a period without light, often called the dark age, stars, galaxies and quasars began to form. The light from distant quasars lets astronomers study the dim clouds of gas and dust in the early universe before they coalesced into galaxies like the Milky Way, said Dr. Esther M. Hu, an astronomer at the University of Haw

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