After 20 years of searching, astronomers identified the ancient quasar with the help of strong gravitational lensing. In 2019 it was announced that Hubble had observed the brightest quasar in the early Universe.
Credit: Charles Steidel (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA) and NASA/ESA Located about 7 billion light-years away, the galaxy is almost directly in front of the quasar. Although the two objects appear to be close to each other, they are actually separated by about 2 billion light-years. The fainter object just above it is an elliptical galaxy.
The Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 captured this image of the quasar, the bright object in the center of the photo. The Hubble Space Telescope achieved its 100,000th exposure on June 22, 1996, with a snapshot of a quasar that is about 9 billion light-years from Earth.
