What looks to be two dim stars in this image from my observatory turns out to be one of the most interesting...and certainly the most distant...object I've ever photographed. As in most of astronomy, knowing what you are looking at is key since appearances can be deceiving.

At the center of this image, which is a small field in the constellation Ursa Major, is a double image of a single "Quasar"...or Quasi-Stellar Object. Due to the expansion of the Universe as dictated by the law first discovered by astronomer Edwin Hubble, one of the measuring devices that we can use to determine the distance to the farthest objects is their spectral red shift. All glowing objects, including stars, have the fingerprint of the chemical elements making them up in their light spectrum. We can look at the details in a spectrum and tell accurately what elements are in that star's outer layers. Hubble found that objects that are moving towards us have the markers in their spectrum shifted towards the blue end of the spectrum, and objects moving away are shifted towards the red end. How far that shift is is determined by their relative speed, and since the Universe is expanding from the initial Big Bang that started it all, an object's distance can be determined from its speed, with the farthest objects receding from us at the greatest velocity. Quasars are objects that have exceedingly high red shifts, meaning that they are extremely far away. But the question is, what kind of object could put out such tremendous amounts of light energy that it could be seen across the distances indicated by their red shifts? The theory is that these are early stage galaxies with huge black holes in their centers that are sucking in prodigious amounts of material and shining bright enough to be seen almost all of the way across the observable Universe. Interestingly, we only see quasars at huge distances...while over a million of them have been detected, none exist closer than about a billion light years from us, indicating that these objects no longer exist. Somewhere over a billion years ago, they ceased to exist. So, all of the quasars that we can observe are being seen by light that was emitted from them eons ago.

In the image above, the double starlike object is quasar QSO 0957+561 with the two elements named A and B. The spectral red shift indicates a distance of 8.7 billion light years...by far the most distant object I've ever photographed. The age of the Universe has been determined to be 13.8 billion years, so we are seeing this quasar as it existed more than half way back to the beginning of time! When first discovered in 1979, it was noted that two quasars appearing in the sky so close together were a statistical anomaly. Soon, after, it was found that their spectral fingerprints were identical...meaning that they had a similar chemical makeup. Even stranger, they had identical red shifts, meaning that they lie at approximately the same distance. Albert Einstein had theorized that massive objects such as a galaxy could bend the light of objects beyond it, creating a phenomenon known as "gravitational lensing". The gravity of our own Sun bends starlight around it such that during total solar eclipses, we can see stars that are actually slightly behind the Sun, so we know that the phenomena exists. Could an intervening galaxy, or group of galaxies too dim to see be causing the light from the quasar to be diffracted into a double image? When large telescopes were trained on the object, indeed a group of galaxies nearly directly in line was found...and we are indeed seeing TWO images of the SAME object!

When large radio telescopes were used to study the object, a "relativistic jet"....a jet of material traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light was found to be spewing from one of the images....and the mirror image of it was coming from the other! The gravitational lensing is causing each of these two images to be mirror images of each other! But the strangeness continues...it was determined by noting flare activity in the spectra of the two images that events that occur on one, do NOT occur on the other at the same time...but are delayed by 14 months. The path lengths of the two images differ by 1.1 light years, causing a delay in one image of 14 months. The path length is 8.7 billion light years, with a difference of 1.1 light year...a 1 in over 8 billion difference...very small but over that distance making 14 months of difference in the light travel time. So, not only are we seeing light that has been travelling for 8.7 billion years, we are seeing two images of the same object displaced by 14 months in time! It's like seeing two visions of a person standing side by side, but differing only by age. This, to me is extraordinary!!! Relativistic physics on display.

Interestingly, in researching the contents of this image, ANOTHER quasar is to be found at the left of the image. This is QSO SDSS J10019+5554. I am researching its distance now.