The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope has uncovered 31 of the oldest quasars ever identified, including two record-breaking objects that were already shining with the light of a trillion suns when the universe was just 670 million years old, about 5% of its current age. The discovery, announced in July 2026, more than doubles the known population of quasars from this remote cosmic era and adds fresh weight to a puzzle that has vexed astrophysicists for years: how did black holes billions of times the mass of the sun manage to grow so large so quickly after the Big Bang?
What Happened
Euclid, launched by the European Space Agency to conduct a vast survey of the sky in support of dark matter and dark energy research, identified 31 quasars dating to the universe's first billion years as part of its wide-field survey data. Among them, two stand out as record-setters. The most distant, designated EUCL J172902.75+641018.1, has a redshift of 7.77, while the second, EUCL J125308.55+705432.3, has a redshift of 7.69. In astronomy, redshift measures how much light from a distant object has been stretched by the expansion of the universe on its journey to us, and higher redshift values correspond to greater distances and, because light takes time to travel, to earlier points in cosmic history. Both objects date to when the universe was roughly 670 million years old, making them among the earliest quasars ever directly observed by any telescope, ground-based or space-based.
According to the ESA and multiple science outlets covering the release, these two objects shone with the brightness of a trillion suns despite existing at a time when the universe had barely begun forming its first generations of stars and galaxies, an era astronomers sometimes refer to as the cosmic dawn.
Background: What Quasars Are and Why They Are Hard to Find
A quasar is powered by a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy that is actively feeding on surrounding gas and dust. As that material spirals inward toward the black hole's event horizon, friction and gravitational forces heat it to extreme temperatures, causing it to radiate enormous amounts of light and other electromagnetic energy, often enough to outshine every star in the host galaxy combined, sometimes by a factor of hundreds or even thousands. Because quasars are so luminous, they can be detected across vast cosmic distances even though the galaxies hosting them are otherwise far too faint and small to observe directly at such extreme range using current telescope technology.
Finding quasars from the universe's first billion years has historically been extraordinarily difficult work. It requires surveying enormous areas of sky to catch these rare, bright needles in an otherwise dark and mostly empty cosmic haystack, since quasars from this era are both exceedingly rare and, despite their intrinsic brightness, appear extremely faint from Earth's vantage point due to the immense distances involved. Prior to Euclid's survey, locating the first roughly ten quasars at a redshift of 7 or higher, corresponding to this earliest cosmic era, took the astronomical community more than a decade of dedicated effort spread across multiple observatories, survey programs, and international research collaborations.
Key Details of the Discovery
Scale of the Find
Euclid identified 31 total ancient quasars in its survey data, more than doubling the previously known population from this era in a single data release.
The Record Holders
The two most extreme examples, at redshifts of 7.77 and 7.69, are now among the earliest quasars ever confirmed by any observational program, pushing back the observable frontier of quasar detection closer to the Big Bang itself.
Extraordinary Luminosity
Both record-setting quasars were already extraordinarily luminous at the time their light left them, radiating with the light of roughly a trillion suns, a scale of brightness that is difficult to reconcile with the very limited amount of cosmic time available for the underlying black holes to have grown.
A Wide-Field Survey Advantage
The discoveries emerged from Euclid's wide-field survey strategy, which trades the extreme close-up detail of telescopes like James Webb for the ability to scan enormous areas of sky efficiently, making it particularly well suited to catching rare bright objects like distant quasars that a narrower, deeper survey might simply miss entirely.
A Dramatic Efficiency Gain
Euclid achieved in roughly a year of observations what took more than a decade of prior searching to accomplish using earlier generations of survey telescopes and instruments, illustrating a substantial leap in survey efficiency made possible by Euclid's specific combination of field of view, sensitivity, and data processing capability.
Why It Matters: The Black Hole Growth Problem
The central scientific puzzle these quasars deepen is sometimes called the black hole growth problem. Standard astrophysical models describe black hole growth as governed by the Eddington limit, a theoretical ceiling on how quickly a black hole can accrete matter and grow in mass without the radiation pressure generated by infalling material blowing away the very gas that feeds it, effectively self-limiting the growth rate. Under standard assumptions using this limit, growing a black hole to the billions-of-solar-masses scale implied by these quasars' extreme luminosity should take considerably longer than 670 million years, even starting the growth process from a sizable seed black hole formed in the universe's earliest moments, well before the quasars themselves became observable.
Finding not just one but 31 such objects, including two of record-breaking antiquity, tells astronomers that whatever mechanism allows black holes to grow this fast is not a rare statistical fluke but is instead somewhat more common in the early universe than previously assumed based on the smaller sample sizes available before this survey. That pushes researchers toward seriously considering alternative growth pathways, including the possibility of unusually massive black hole seeds formed through the direct gravitational collapse of massive primordial gas clouds without an intermediate stellar phase, or periods of black hole growth that briefly exceed the standard Eddington limit under specific physical conditions that are still being modeled and debated within the field.
Reactions From the Astronomical Community
Coverage of the discovery in outlets including Scientific American, ScienceDaily, and CBS News quoted researchers describing the quasars as perplexing additions to an already challenging body of evidence about early black hole formation that has been accumulating from multiple independent observational programs in recent years. Astronomers involved in the Euclid survey have characterized the sample size as scientifically important precisely because it moves the conversation beyond individual record-breaking curiosities, which can sometimes be dismissed as statistical outliers, toward a statistically meaningful population that theories of black hole formation now need to explain collectively as a class of objects, not simply explain away one at a time as isolated anomalies.
The broader astrophysics community has generally welcomed the findings as an opportunity rather than solely a challenge to existing theory, since a larger sample of early quasars gives theorists considerably more data points against which to test competing models of black hole seed formation, potentially allowing the field to narrow down which of several competing theoretical frameworks best matches the observed population.
What Quasars Reveal About Galaxy Evolution
Beyond their value as extreme physics laboratories in their own right, quasars serve astronomers as unusually effective probes of the broader galactic environments they inhabit. Because a quasar's supermassive black hole is embedded at the center of a host galaxy, studying the light from a quasar and its immediate surroundings can reveal information about the gas content, chemical composition, and star-forming activity of that host galaxy even when the galaxy itself would be far too faint to study directly at these extreme distances. Some of the 31 newly identified quasars are expected to serve as valuable case studies for understanding what galaxies looked like structurally and chemically during the universe's first billion years, a period for which direct observational data of any kind remains comparatively scarce despite recent advances from telescopes including James Webb. Absorption features imprinted on a quasar's light as it passes through intervening gas clouds on its multi-billion-year journey to Earth can also reveal the composition and distribution of gas in the space between galaxies during this early era, offering an additional and largely independent line of evidence about conditions in the early universe.
Historical and Comparative Context
The search for extremely distant quasars has been a defining pursuit of observational cosmology for several decades now. Early quasar discoveries in the 1960s revealed the phenomenon itself for the first time, identifying these objects as a distinct and enormously energetic class of astronomical source, but pushing the observable frontier back toward the Big Bang has been a slow, incremental process ever since, with each successive record-holder typically standing for only a few years before being surpassed by an even more distant find as instrumentation and survey techniques improved. The current findings continue a broader trend seen across multiple independent lines of early-universe research in recent years, including the James Webb Space Telescope's own discoveries of surprisingly massive and structurally mature-looking galaxies in the early universe, findings that have similarly forced astronomers to reconsider how quickly cosmic structures of various kinds can plausibly form after the Big Bang. Together, these findings from different observational programs paint a consistent picture of an early universe that was considerably more active and structurally advanced, more quickly, than models built primarily on observations of the nearby, present-day universe had predicted just a decade or so ago.
Broader Implications for Astrophysics
Beyond the specific puzzle of black hole growth rates, these findings have implications for models of galaxy formation more broadly, since supermassive black holes and their host galaxies are thought to grow in a linked, co-evolutionary process where each influences the other's development over cosmic time. A population of unexpectedly massive early black holes suggests their host galaxies may also have assembled mass and structure faster than standard models predict, a finding with ripple effects across the simulations of cosmic structure formation that are used throughout astrophysics to model everything from galaxy clustering to the large-scale structure of the universe itself.
The discovery also demonstrates the scientific value of wide-field survey telescopes as a complement to deep, narrow-field instruments like James Webb, rather than as a competing or redundant approach. Euclid's primary mission is focused on mapping the distribution of galaxies across enormous volumes of the sky to study dark matter and dark energy, but this quasar discovery is a useful reminder that large astronomical surveys frequently yield significant unplanned discoveries simply by observing enormous volumes of sky systematically and consistently, discoveries that a mission focused narrowly on its primary science goals might never have anticipated at the design stage.
How Euclid's Survey Method Made the Discovery Possible
Euclid's core scientific mission is not primarily focused on quasar hunting at all; the telescope was designed and launched principally to map the distribution of billions of galaxies across roughly a third of the sky over its planned mission lifetime, using that enormous dataset to study how dark matter and dark energy have shaped the large-scale structure of the universe over cosmic time. To accomplish that primary goal, Euclid was engineered with an unusually wide field of view compared to specialized deep-field instruments, paired with sensitive optical and near-infrared instruments capable of capturing high-quality images and spectroscopic data across enormous areas of sky in relatively short observation windows. It is precisely this combination, breadth of coverage paired with sufficient depth and sensitivity, that made the quasar discovery possible as what scientists sometimes call a serendipitous byproduct of a survey designed for an entirely different primary purpose.
Identifying candidate quasars within Euclid's vast dataset required sophisticated data processing pipelines capable of distinguishing the specific light signatures of extremely distant, high-redshift quasars from the vastly more numerous population of foreground stars, nearby galaxies, and closer, less extreme quasars that also appear in the same survey data. Researchers used a combination of automated color-selection techniques, which identify candidate objects based on how their light has been reddened and stretched by cosmic expansion, followed by spectroscopic follow-up observations to confirm the precise redshift and therefore the true distance and age of each candidate object.
Connecting Back to Euclid's Primary Dark Matter and Dark Energy Mission
While the quasar discovery has generated considerable attention in its own right, it is worth noting how it connects back to Euclid's core scientific purpose. The same enormous, wide-field dataset that revealed these ancient quasars is simultaneously being used by other research teams within the Euclid collaboration to measure the subtle gravitational lensing effects that reveal the distribution of dark matter throughout the universe, and to track how the expansion rate of the universe has changed over cosmic history as a probe of dark energy. The quasar discovery is, in that sense, a demonstration of the broader scientific value of Euclid's survey strategy: the same dataset built to answer one set of fundamental cosmological questions is proving capable of yielding unexpected and scientifically significant answers to entirely different questions about the early universe, black hole formation, and galaxy evolution, extending the mission's scientific return well beyond its original design goals.
The International Collaboration Behind the Discovery
The Euclid mission itself represents a large-scale international scientific collaboration coordinated by the European Space Agency, involving contributions from research institutions and funding agencies across numerous European countries alongside additional participation from NASA and researchers in the United States. This kind of large, multi-national collaborative structure has become increasingly common and, in many respects, increasingly necessary for major space astronomy missions, given the enormous cost and technical complexity involved in designing, building, launching, and operating a space telescope capable of surveying billions of galaxies with the sensitivity and precision Euclid's science goals require. The quasar discovery specifically emerged from analysis conducted by researchers across this international collaboration working with Euclid's early survey data releases, illustrating how findings like this one typically result from the coordinated effort of dozens or even hundreds of scientists and engineers across multiple countries and institutions, rather than from a single research group working in isolation.
This collaborative model also has implications for how quickly discoveries like this one can be verified and built upon. Because Euclid's data is shared across a wide research consortium under agreed data-release schedules, multiple independent research teams are typically able to analyze the same underlying observations, cross-checking findings and pursuing different follow-up questions in parallel, which tends to accelerate the pace at which initial discoveries are confirmed, refined, and extended by the broader astronomical community.
What to Watch Next
Astronomers are expected to pursue detailed follow-up observations of the newly identified quasars in the coming months and years, likely including time on the James Webb Space Telescope, which can provide considerably more precise measurements of black hole mass, host galaxy properties, and the surrounding gas environment than Euclid's wide-field survey data alone can offer. These follow-up observations should help distinguish between the competing theories of black hole seed formation currently under discussion in the field. As Euclid's survey continues and covers additional sky area over its planned multi-year mission lifetime, astronomers anticipate finding still more examples from this early cosmic era, potentially pushing the observable frontier even closer to the Big Bang itself and further refining the statistical picture of just how common, or how exceptional, these ancient supermassive black holes really turn out to be once a larger and more complete sample is in hand.
This article summarizes publicly reported developments around the Euclid quasar discovery and will be updated as more information becomes available.
