14 DAY TRIAL // Astronomers operating the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have just released this breathtaking image of a double quasar, an extremely-rare cosmic structure that consists of two quasi-stellar radio sources lying very close to each other.
This particular structure is known as QSO 0957+561, and lies more than 13 billion light-years away from our planet. This means that the light we are now seeing from this object was first emitted towards Earth when the Universe was less than 1 billion years old.
In the image above, the two objects seem to share some properties, such as their distance from Earth, their close proximity to one another, and so on. According to astronomers, the new Hubble data reveal the fact that this is in fact the same quasar, not two separate entities.
The reason why we see it double is because the giant galaxy YGKOW G1 lies right between the quasar and our solar system, some 4 billion light-years away. Its huge gravitational pull creates a phenomenon called galactic lensing, which in turn generates the optical illusion that QSO 0957+561 consists of two quasars.