(CNN) One of the premier cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope is no longer working and NASA has shut it down while the issue is investigated.

It's not all bad news, however: the Hubble recently captured the brightest quasar in the early universe, the space agency revealed on Wednesday.

A quasar is the ultra-bright center of a newly forming galaxy, expelling energy as gas is consumed by the black hole at its heart.

The Hubble telescope, which travels the Earth at about 5 miles per second -- equivalent to driving from America's East to West Coast in 10 minutes -- faces out to space to take pictures of planets, stars and galaxies to help scientists learn about the solar system.

This very distant quasar has been magnified and split into three images due to the gravitational field of a foreground galaxy. The quasar would have gone undetected if not for the power of gravitational lensing, which boosted its brightness 50x #AAS233 https://t.co/fLZnQXBVYe pic.twitter.com/Uv3lYjRBNx — Hubble (@NASAHubble) January 9, 2019

The quasar found by the Hubble is 12.8 billion light-years away, NASA said, but was detectable thanks to the amplifying impact of a less distant galaxy.

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