Its light has taken some 2.5 billion years to reach us. Despite this great distance, it is still one of the closest quasars to our home. It was the first quasar ever to be identified, and was discovered in the early 1960s by astronomer Allan Sandage.
This new NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows ghostly green filaments, lying within the galaxy Teacup (also known as 2MASX J14302986+1339117). This filament was illuminated by a blast of radiation from a quasar — a very luminous and compact region that surrounds the supermassive black hole at the centre of its host galaxy.
Hubble has taken this stunning close-up shot of part of the Tarantula Nebula. This star-forming region of ionised hydrogen gas is in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy which neighbours the Milky Way.
The ring swirling around Saturn consists of chunks of ice and dust. Saturn itself is made of ammonia ice and methane gas. The little dark spot on Saturn is the shadow from Saturn's moon Enceladus.