American Astronomical Society meeting. Three-headed quasar promises to shed light on universe's past.

"We have found the first case of a physical triple-quasar system," said astronomer George Djorgovski of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, leader of an international team reporting the discovery at the meeting. Two of the quasars in the group, designated QQQ 1432-0106, were discovered before 1989. Astronomers originally believed that the pair was an illusion created by gravitational lensing of a single quasar. Such lensing, an effect of Einstein's general theory of relativity, occurs when an intervening mass's gravity bends the light arriving from distant objects. In many known cases, such lensing bends the light from a distant quasar so much that it appears to arrive at Earth from multiple pathways, creating the impression of more than one object.