By comparison, the most distant galaxy and the most distant quasar ever observed, as of 2005, had a redshift of 6.96 and 6.43, respectively.
Combining his measurements of galaxy distances with Vesto Slipher and Milton Humason's measurements of the redshifts associated with the galaxies, Hubble discovered a rough proportionality between redshift of an object and its distance.
While its star-like appearance suggested it was relatively nearby, the spectrum of 3C 273 proved to have what was at the time a high redshift of 0.158, showing that it lay far beyond the Milky Way, and thus possessed an extraordinarily high luminosity.
Rowan-Robinson's research interests include: The Spitzer Space Telescope SWIRE project; The European Large Area ISO Survey; The UK SCUBA Survey (see James Clerk Maxwell Telescope); The IRAS PSC Redshift Survey ; the Herschel Space Observatory SPIRE instrument; the Planck Surveyor HFI.
In 2009, a gamma ray burst, GRB 090423, was found to have a redshift of 8.2, which indicates that the collapsing star that caused it exploded when the universe was only 630 million years old.
William G. Tifft was the first to investigate possible redshift quantization, or "redshift-magnitude banding correlation", as he first called it.