Hubble spots rare double quasar 10 billion light-years away, offering clues to early universe

Ten billion light-years away and ten billion years in the past, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured two quasars in their final moments before merging — a collision so rare that astronomers had to rule out the cosmos itself playing tricks with bent light before they could believe what they saw. These twin beacons, each outshining entire galaxies, offer a frozen record of the violent processes that built the large-scale structures of the universe, including perhaps our own Milky Way. We observe an ending that has already occurred, reminded that the sky above us is less a window to the presen