Abraham Loeb, a theoretical astrophysicist at Harvard University, predicted along with Princeton's Zoltan Haiman in 1999 that Chandra should be able to see galaxies up to redshift 10, dramatically close to the time when they first began to form.

That finding would be important because it would help prove theories of how the universe formed. Here is why:

"The popular model for galaxy formation predicts that the first galaxies to have formed in the universe had low masses," Loeb said. "Since the first galaxies were less massive, their black holes were less massive."

But they would still be identifiable in X-rays, because black holes present the ultimate paradox: Though they can't be seen, they are responsible for the grand emissions that make quasars and their presumed predecessors visible.

These smaller galaxies merged in the early universe to form the large galaxies, the quasars, the theory holds.

If true, then along the way pairs of black holes would have danced around one another before coalescing to form more massive objects, Loeb said.

Brandt says he is tantalizingly close to proving Loeb's idea.

Ironically, if Chandra is to lay claim to the most distant object ever spotted, Brandt and his colleagues will need to enlist the help of another telescope. Either Hubble or a giant ground-based telescope will be needed to determine the redshift, in infrared, of the candidates first ferreted out in X-rays.

Last Friday, Sept. 7, was the deadline for proposals to get time on Hubble for the 12 months beginning in the middle of 2002. Brandt and his colleagues, of course, have thrown their hat into the ring and crossed their fingers -- time on the Hubble telescope could nail down their hunches in the search for extremely distant objects.

Large ground-based observatories, such as the Keck telescope in Hawaii, can also determine redshift if they first know what to focus in on.

And another large-scale near-infrared effort is just underway.

The National Optical Astronomy Observatory's (NOAO) Deep Wide-Field Survey has reported some preliminary findings and will continue making observations through early next year using a pair of ground-based telescopes. The survey, not as widely known as others, is billed as deeper than Sloan and wider than Hubble.

Arjun Dey, an NOAO staff astronomer, says his team may have a redshift 7 object in their data and has plans for an improved detection method that should soon take them even deeper into the cosmos in short order.

"Within a year, astronomers will easily be out beyond redshifts of 7," Dey told SPACE.com. "I certainly hope we will get there first."

Dey and his colleagues even plan to up the ante, spotting young, very simple galaxies that don't have active black holes and therefore might not emit enough X-rays to be detected.

X-ray astronomers, however, think they are on the right track. And the Chandra Observatory, touted as the most powerful X-ray telescope ever built, is their torch.

Harvey Tananbaum is director of the Chandra X-ray Center, operated for NASA by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Tananbaum spent most of last week touting the telescope's list of accomplishments to attendees of "Two Years of Science with Chandra," a symposium organized to celebrate the observatory's first two years.

He rattled the list off for scientists, for journalists, for NASA officials who provide the telescope's operating budget -- for anyone who would listen.

But many more Chandra findings are not widely known outside the scientific community. Chandra's methods and targets can be esoteric, and the telescope's pictures usually are less pretty than Hubble's.

Not that publicity is a primary goal. But wouldn't a pure and unqualified distance record -- the most distant object ever detected by humans -- be a nice feather in Chandra's cap?

"Sure," Tananbaum says, a wide grin of anticipation crossing his face. Then the grin disappears as quickly as it came, and Tananbaum extols the scientific virtues of such a discovery.