We present measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation ( BAO ) scale in redshift-space using the clustering of quasars .
We consider a sample of 147,000 quasars from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey ( eBOSS ) distributed over 2044 square degrees with redshifts 0.8 < z < 2.2 and measure their spherically-averaged clustering in both configuration and Fourier space .
Our observational dataset and the 1400 simulated realizations of the dataset allow us to detect a preference for BAO that is greater than 2.8 \sigma .
We determine the spherically averaged BAO distance to z = 1.52 to 3.8 per cent precision : D _ { V } ( z = 1.52 ) = 3843 \pm 147 \left ( r _ { d } / r _ { d,fid } \right ) Mpc .
This is the first time the location of the BAO feature has been measured between redshifts 1 and 2 .
Our result is fully consistent with the prediction obtained by extrapolating the Planck flat \Lambda CDM best-fit cosmology .
All of our results are consistent with basic large-scale structure ( LSS ) theory , confirming quasars to be a reliable tracer of LSS , and provide a starting point for numerous cosmological tests to be performed with eBOSS quasar samples .
We combine our result with previous , independent , BAO distance measurements to construct an updated BAO distance-ladder .
Using these BAO data alone and marginalizing over the length of the standard ruler , we find \Omega _ { \Lambda } > 0 at 6.6 \sigma significance when testing a \Lambda CDM model with free curvature .