A new survey of 31 ancient quasars includes two all-time record-breakers that shone 13 billion years ago. Euclid did in a year what took all prior telescopes over a decade.
Finding the first ten quasars from the universe’s very first 770 million years took all of humanity’s combined telescope time more than a decade. ESA’s Euclid space telescope found twelve - and announced a total of 31 - in roughly one year.
On July 6, 2026, an international team led by Daming Yang of Leiden University published the results in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Two of the newly identified quasars are the oldest ever recorded. The most ancient, catalogued EUCL J172902.75+641018.1, has a redshift of 7.77. The second, EUCL J125308.55+705432.3, measures 7.69. Both shone when the universe was only 670 million years old - approximately 5 percent of its current 13.8 billion years - with the brightness of a trillion suns.
A quasar - short for quasi-stellar object - is not a star. It is the intensely lit core of a young galaxy, powered by a supermassive black hole (a black hole millions or billions of times the mass of our Sun) consuming enormous quantities of matter. As gas and dust spiral inward, they heat to millions of degrees and radiate energy outward across the full electromagnetic spectrum. The brightest quasars outshine everything else in their host galaxies by a factor of thousands.
The age matters because of redshift. As the universe expands, light from distant objects gets stretched toward longer, redder wavelengths - a phenomenon called redshift. The higher the redshift value, the farther - and older - the source. A redshift of 7.77 means the light has been travelling for roughly 13 billion years. Seeing it is, in a measurable sense, looking back to a time when the universe had barely begun forming the first structures.
“By finding and studying them, we can better understand how these enormous systems formed and grew so quickly - one of the greatest mysteries in astrophysics,” Yang told ESA.
Here is that mystery in concrete terms. A supermassive black hole has to grow - and growing takes time. Black holes build mass by consuming surrounding matter, and the rate at which they can do so has a natural ceiling rooted in physics. For a black hole to reach the mass needed to power a quasar visible at redshift 7 or above, it would normally require billions of years of steady consumption.
The universe at 670 million years old had barely had time to produce the first generation of stars, let alone for those stars to live, die, and leave remnant black holes that could then merge and grow over further billions of years. The quasars Euclid found should not exist yet - or at least, they should not be as massive and luminous as they are.
Competing theories propose that the very first Population III stars (the primordial generation, composed entirely of hydrogen and helium, not yet observed) left unusually large remnant black holes that grew faster than later generations, or that dense clouds of primordial gas collapsed directly into massive black holes without forming stars at all. Neither theory is fully confirmed by current evidence, according to ESA.
Before Euclid, most ancient quasar discoveries happened the same way: painstaking, multi-year searches through survey data to identify rare, exceptionally bright outliers. Each new find at redshift 7 or higher was a headline event. Euclid’s architecture changes the economics entirely.
The telescope observes wide swaths of sky simultaneously, covering areas that would require years of conventional survey time. According to ESA, this lets researchers “search far more efficiently across huge areas of sky.” The result is not a handful of individually celebrated record-breakers but a statistically meaningful population sample.
That distinction is scientifically significant. A dozen handpicked outliers might all be exceptional. Thirty-one objects drawn from a systematic survey define a distribution - and from a distribution, researchers can derive the actual density of such ancient quasars, how they cluster, and how they compare to models of early galaxy formation. In just two years of science operations, Euclid has more than doubled the total number of ancient quasars at redshift 7 or above known to science, according to ESA.
The 31 quasars also provide the first meaningful census of objects from the epoch of reionization - the period roughly 380,000 to 800 million years after the Big Bang when the universe transitioned from a dark, neutral fog of hydrogen to the ionized, transparent cosmos we observe today. What powered that transition is one of cosmology’s central open questions; quasars at these distances are among the prime candidates.
ESA notes that the findings will also help prepare scientific goals for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is designed to survey even larger volumes of sky at complementary wavelengths and will be able to follow up on Euclid’s detections in greater depth.
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