The Hubble Space Telescope discovered a celestial body in the constellation Lyra390 million light-years from Earth, which defies its classification.

When examining Z 229-15, it sometimes appears as an active galactic nucleus (an AGN); sometimes as a quasar; and sometimes as a Seyfert galaxy. Which of these is really the Z 229-15? The answer is that it’s all of these things at once, because these three definitions overlap significantly, NASA reports.

An AGN is a small region at the heart of certain galaxies (called active galaxies) that is much brighter than the stars in the galaxy would be. The extra brightness is due to the presence of a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s core, details Europe Press. Material sucked into a black hole does not fall directly into it, but is instead pulled into a spinning disk, from where it is inexorably dragged towards the black hole. This disc of matter gets so hot that it releases a tremendous amount of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum, which is why AGNs appear so bright.

Quasars are a particular type of AGN; they are typically extremely bright and extremely far from Earth: several hundred million light years are considered close for a quasar, making Z 229-15 positively local.

Often an AGN is so bright that the rest of the galaxy cannot be seen, but Seyfert galaxies are active galaxies with very bright AGNs (quasars) while the rest of the galaxy is still observable. So Z 229-15 is a Seyfert galaxy containing a quasar and by definition harboring an AGN.