Twinkle, twinkle little star . . .

Press, 11 October 1982, Page 9

Twinkle, twinkle little star . . .

NZPA Pasadena Astronomers reported yesterday the discovery of the most distant object ever seen in the heavens — a quasar perhaps 12 billion light years from Earth. The American. Australian and British team said that the celestial object must be very near the edge of the known universe. It was seen as little more than a faint speck of light on a photograph taken through a telescope. The discovery was announced in a news release from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. in California.

Quasars, discovered in 1960. are mysterious objects that appear in the sky as star-like objects, but seem to be located incredibly far away and to generate more light than 100 billion stars.

Until the new find, no quasars were discovered beyond about 11 billion light years, and some scientists suspected that that might represent their outer limit. That limit, this theory suggests. meant quasars were formed suddenly in some flurry of cosmic activity 11 billion years ago. A light year is a measure of the distance light travels in a year — 9.6 trillion kilometres.

'So you are looking back in time — that light left it 12 billion years ago,” said Mike Klein, a J.P.L. astronomer not directly involved in the research.

According to the way astronomers commonly determine distance, he said, “This is an object that is farther away than anything else we have seen to date." The scientists on the team include Samuel Gulkis of America, David Jauncey and Michael Batty of Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, Bruce Peterson of the Australian National University, and Anne Savage of the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, Scotland.