WASHINGTON D.C. -- The most distant objects in the universe will likely be spotted soon or may already have been detected by one of several telescopes and could be waiting merely for astronomers to mine the existing data.

Announcements are likely within 12 months, SPACE.com has learned.

Most important, some of the galaxies that will be found are expected to be so young, their light coming from so far back in time, that they have not yet developed into the hugely massive and bright "quasars" that hold the current distance records.

Finding these smaller objects would reveal an unseen era in time and help researchers understand the earliest stages of galaxy and black hole evolution.

Archived near-infrared data from the Hubble Space Telescope may also reveal record-setters. And leaders of a third project, run by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, have their own plan to sneak into the lead.

But scientists must first painstakingly piece together incredibly small pieces of data -- scraps of radiation separated by hours or even days of blankness.

The race to the edge of the universe is on, one photon at a time.

All electromagnetic radiation, including visible light and X-rays, is made up of particles called photons. But light also travels in waves. It is neither pure particle nor pure wave. Visible light, however, is highly wavelike. At higher energy levels on the electromagnetic spectrum, where X-rays reside, light takes on more particle-like properties.

Attempts to study the early universe involve capturing a handful of these photons and adding them up over several days to determine the sort of object that might have generated them.

X-ray astronomers such as Niel Brandt, a Penn State University researcher, get as little as a photon a day to work with in the hunt for an object of this sort.

But Brandt knows that Nature is kind in letting these photons get through at all. He works on a team of X-ray astronomers that recently helped discover the most distant "low-luminosity active galaxy." The finding was announced here last week at a symposium for Chandra Observatory researchers.

Brandt explains that only higher energy X-rays survive the trip across the cosmos and through our galaxy from objects that may be up to 12 billion light-years away, which means the objects existed in time and space nearly 12 billion years ago -- just after the Big Bang.

Nature treats visible light differently, however. Intervening clouds of hydrogen gas act like a forest that absorbs the photons of visible light. This sets up an effect that astronomers call the Lyman Alpha Forest, in fact, a limit to how far optical telescopes can see.

For this reason, the absolute farthest objects that exist in the Universe cannot be seen in visible light. Near-infrared telescopes can see these objects, but they record them amid a clutter of other observations. X-ray telescopes have the best chance of discovering these objects, several researchers said.

As an object moves away from the Earth, the waves of its radiation are stretched out, or shifted from the blue end of the spectrum toward the red.

The redshift scale is like a logarithmic one: The difference between redshift 1.0 and 2.0 is billions of years, but the difference between redshift 6 and 7 is only hundreds of millions of years. The most distant echoes of the cosmos come from redshift 1,000 or higher, manifested in a background of radiation detected recently as radio waves.

Near the beginning of time, the redshift approaches infinity -- it's a time we will never see, scientists say.

The redshift 6.2 object was identified in visible light by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, which has dominated the record scene for the past few years and currently lays claim to the four most distant objects known.

Sloan scientists use ground-based telescopes in visible light to identify candidates. Follow-up optical and near-infrared measurements are made to determine redshift.

Quasars are hard to miss, if you know what you're looking for. And if you do, you're looking in the right wavelengths. Yet the Sloan survey, which relies on visible light, is nearly at its limit of redshift 6.5.

The X-ray crowd, with the help of follow-up infrared observations, is nipping at Sloan's heels.

Last week, things got really interesting when Brandt announced the most distant low-luminosity active galaxy ever detected, with a redshift of 5.18. The discovery was made in the optical by Amy Barger of the University of Wisconsin and Len Cowie at the University of Hawaii, after Brandt and his team had provided the initial X-ray data.

Like a quasar, the redshift 5.18 object is an "active" galaxy, meaning that its central black hole is actively gathering mass. These types of galaxies are thought to be common in the early universe.

But the newly found object is about 100 times less luminous than a quasar. Discovering it is likely a sign of ever more distant objects to be announced, because researchers expect these types of galaxies to be common beyond redshift 6.5.

The hunt for these young, less luminous galaxies can also be conducted in the near-infrared band of the spectrum, which does not suffer the same limitation as visible light. In fact Hubble may already have spotted a record-breaker in a near-infrared survey called the Hubble Deep Field, two sets of observations taken in 1995 and 1998 that are still being studied.

There are objects in the Hubble Deep Field that give off hints at being as far away as redshift 10, said Henry Ferguson, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which manages the telescope. But the objects are too faint, the data too thin, to know for sure.

Along with colleagues, Ferguson hopes to pin down at least one of these objects and claim the title. He said many groups, using several ground- and space-based telescopes, are in the race.

"It's been that way for years," he said, adding that competition is healthy for science.

"Having the highest redshift object attached to their name is something anyone would want," Ferguson said. "Even if it only lasts a few weeks."

He said it is unlikely but conceivable that Hubble, perhaps in cooperation with a ground-based telescope, might set a record within a year.

But Ferguson says he and his colleagues have a tremendous needle-in-the-haystack problem -- another advantage conceded to the X-ray crowd.

In a given patch of sky that contains about 80,000 galaxies visible in the near-infrared, any one of which could be a distant quasar or a nearby galaxy, Niel Brandt and his colleagues found just 370 X-ray sources. Of these, they studied 141 on which they had the best data. Just 15 do not show up in optical data and so may well be farther away than redshift 6.5.

Some are almost certainly moderately redshifted quasars that are just highly obscured in visible light.

But about three, Brandt figures, stand a real chance of setting a new all-wavelength distance record, possibly as high as redshift 10. And with more observation time scheduled, he said such an announcement could come within a year.

"I think it's very plausible," he said.

Other experts in galaxy formation and X-ray astronomy agree with Brandt that the objects should be there, these low-luminosity galaxies destined to grow into quasars. And Chandra should be able to find them, "unless there's something we don't know about quasar evolution," says Martin Weisskopf, chief of X-ray astronomy at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and a Chandra project scientist.

"If they evolved as we think they did, we should be able to see them out to redshift 10," Weisskopf said.