Astronomers spotted 31 of the oldest quasars ever seen, including the two earliest.

The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope has pulled off one of the more striking finds of its young mission, identifying 31 of the oldest quasars ever recorded, including the two most distant examples ever confirmed. The discovery pushes back the observational record for these extraordinarily bright objects and adds fresh weight to a long-running puzzle about how the universe managed to build supermassive black holes so quickly after the Big Bang.

Quasars are among the most luminous objects in the known universe, powered by supermassive black holes actively feeding on surrounding gas and dust. As material spirals into the black hole, it heats up and radiates enormous amounts of energy, allowing quasars to outshine entire galaxies and remain visible across billions of light-years of cosmic distance.

Light From the Universe’s First Half-Billion Years

The two most distant quasars identified in the new batch stand out even among the group. Both shone with the brightness of roughly a trillion suns at a time when the universe was only about 670 million years old, a mere five percent of its current age. Their light has been traveling toward Earth for roughly 13 billion years, meaning the images captured by Euclid show these objects as they existed when the cosmos itself was still in its infancy, according to a writeup published by NASA Science detailing the mission’s findings.

That timeframe places the newly identified quasars among the very earliest galaxies and black holes to have formed after the Big Bang, a period astronomers refer to as the cosmic dawn. Finding actively feeding supermassive black holes this early presents a genuine challenge to existing models of galaxy and black hole formation, which generally struggle to explain how objects with masses billions of times that of the sun could assemble in such a comparatively short cosmic timeframe.

A Rapid Pace of Discovery

What makes this announcement notable beyond the individual quasars themselves is the sheer speed at which Euclid has been finding them. Since its launch in 2023, the telescope has effectively doubled the total number of known ancient quasars, objects with redshifts of 7 or higher, a measure astronomers use to gauge how far back in cosmic time an object’s light originated. Before Euclid began its survey work, it had taken astronomers more than a decade of combined effort to identify roughly the first ten quasars at that redshift threshold.

That acceleration reflects the scale of Euclid’s survey capabilities. Rather than targeting individual objects one at a time, the telescope is designed to map enormous swaths of sky, allowing it to catch rare, extremely distant objects like ancient quasars in numbers that targeted searches simply could not match. The 31 quasars identified in this latest batch represent a substantial fraction of all such objects known to science, assembled in a fraction of the time it took to build the earlier catalog.

Why Ancient Quasars Are a Persistent Mystery

The existence of supermassive black holes billions of times the mass of the sun, active and feeding within the universe’s first billion years, remains one of the more stubborn open questions in astrophysics. Standard models of black hole growth, built around gradual accretion of surrounding matter over long timescales, have difficulty accounting for how these objects reached such enormous masses so quickly after the universe’s earliest moments.

Researchers studying the newly identified quasars are treating each one as a data point that could eventually help resolve that tension, whether by revealing patterns in how early black holes grew, pointing toward alternative formation mechanisms, or simply expanding the sample size enough to test existing theories more rigorously. A larger catalog of confirmed ancient quasars gives astrophysicists more material to work with than the sparse handful available before Euclid’s survey began returning results.

What Comes Next for Euclid’s Survey

Euclid’s primary mission is designed to run for years, mapping billions of galaxies across a large portion of the sky primarily to study dark matter and dark energy. The discovery of ancient quasars represents something of a secondary benefit of that broad survey approach, since the telescope’s wide field of view happens to be well suited to catching rare, extremely distant objects that narrower, more targeted telescopes would be far less likely to encounter by chance.

Astronomers involved in the project have indicated that Euclid’s ongoing survey work is expected to continue turning up additional ancient quasars as it covers more of the sky, meaning the current record of 31 objects, including the two earliest yet confirmed, is likely to be a milestone rather than a final total. Each additional detection adds another thread to an increasingly detailed picture of how the universe’s first giant black holes came to be.

Tracking the Story as It Develops

Coverage of the discovery has continued to accumulate as researchers publish additional analysis of the Euclid dataset, with science outlets including a running roundup of astronomy coverage from ScienceDaily tracking related developments in the field as they emerge. That kind of ongoing coverage reflects how quickly the ancient-quasar catalog is expanding, with each new analysis of Euclid’s survey data carrying the potential to add further objects to the current count of 31.

Building Toward a Fuller Picture of Cosmic Dawn

Ancient quasars are not the only tool astronomers use to study the universe’s earliest galaxies, but they offer a distinct advantage: their extreme brightness makes them detectable across cosmic distances that would leave an ordinary galaxy far too faint to observe with current instruments. That visibility advantage is precisely why quasars have become a preferred target for probing the era known as cosmic dawn, the period when the universe’s first stars, galaxies and black holes began to form out of a previously dark, largely featureless expanse of gas.

Combining Euclid’s wide-field quasar survey with more detailed follow-up observations from other telescopes, including instruments capable of measuring a quasar’s mass and feeding rate more precisely, gives researchers multiple independent lines of evidence to work with. That combination is expected to matter most in the coming years, as astronomers try to move beyond simply counting ancient quasars toward explaining, in concrete physical terms, how black holes of such staggering mass managed to assemble so early in the universe’s history.

Morning Overview produced this article with AI assistance and reviewed it against the cited sources.

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