The astronomical data services SIMBAD and NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) list several other names for this system.

[1] The quasars QSO 0957+561A/B were discovered in early 1979 by an Anglo-American team around Dennis Walsh, Robert Carswell and Ray Weyman, with the aid of the 2.1 m Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, United States.

The team noticed that the two quasars were unusually close to each other, and that their redshift and visible light spectrum were very similar to each other.

[8] Finally, a team led by Marc V. Gorenstein observed essentially identical relativistic jets on very small scales from both A and B in 1983 using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI).

In 1996, a team at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led by Rudy E. Schild discovered an anomalous fluctuation in one image's light curve, which they speculated was caused by a planet approximately three Earth masses in size within the lensing galaxy.

Schild's team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics asserted that "this quasar appears to be dynamically dominated by a magnetic field internally anchored to its central, rotating supermassive compact object" (R. E.