Euclid Finds the Oldest Quasars in the Universe So Far

Every so often a survey telescope reaches so far back that it changes what "oldest" means. The European Space Agency's Euclid mission has done exactly that, reporting 31 newly found quasars, among them the two most ancient ever seen. Their light left home when the universe was only about 670 million years old, a tiny fraction of its present age, and it has been travelling toward us for more than 13 billion years.

For a club that spends its clear nights chasing star clusters and planets, quasars are not observing targets in any practical sense. But the discovery is a fine excuse to explain one of the strangest objects in the sky, and to point out the one quasar you can actually glimpse from a dark Maine backyard with enough aperture and patience.

What a quasar actually is

A quasar is the ferociously bright center of a young galaxy. At its heart sits a supermassive black hole, millions to billions of times the mass of the Sun, pulling in surrounding gas. That gas does not fall quietly. It piles into a swirling accretion disk, heats to enormous temperatures through friction, and radiates so intensely that the core can outshine every star in its galaxy combined. Astronomers file quasars under the broader label active galactic nucleus, the engine-room name for a feeding black hole.

That brilliance is why we can detect them across almost the entire observable universe. A quasar is a lighthouse switched on in the deep past, and its beam is still reaching us long after the scene that produced it has changed beyond recognition.

Why "ancient" and "distant" mean the same thing here

Light travels at a fixed speed, so looking far into space is always looking back in time. The measure astronomers use is redshift: as the universe expands, it stretches the wavelengths of light on the long journey to us, shifting it toward the red end of the spectrum. The higher the redshift, the longer the light has been travelling, and the earlier the era we are seeing.

The two record-setters carry redshifts of 7.77 and 7.69. In plain terms, we are seeing them as they were during the universe's first few hundred million years, a stretch astronomers call cosmic dawn, when the first galaxies were just switching on. Finding fully formed quasars that early is genuinely puzzling, because it means their central black holes grew to monstrous size startlingly fast.

Why a survey telescope changes the game

Quasars this ancient are rare, and rarity is a numbers problem. It took astronomers more than a decade to confirm the first handful at redshift 7 or beyond. Euclid, in a single year, has more than doubled that tally. The reason is design. Euclid is a wide-field survey instrument, built to photograph huge swaths of sky in one go rather than peer at one target at a time. Its true mission is to map the influence of dark energy and dark matter across billions of galaxies, and the ancient quasars are a bonus catch swept up in that vast net.

It is a familiar pattern in modern astronomy: point a fast, wide camera at the whole sky, and the rarest objects turn up on their own. Amateur observers meet the same logic on a smaller scale every time a wide-field sweep with binoculars turns up something a narrow high-power view would have missed. We wrote about the same survey-first approach when the Rubin Observatory began its ten-year sky movie.

What the record really tells us

The value of a discovery like this is not the trophy of "oldest." It is the set of questions it forces open. If black holes this large existed when the universe was so young, our picture of how they formed and fed needs work. Each new ancient quasar is a data point in that argument, and a wide survey delivers them by the dozen rather than one hard-won example at a time.

The researchers published their findings on July 6, 2026, in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, after peer review. That last detail matters: the record stands because independent scientists checked the redshift measurements, the same discipline that separates a confirmed observation from a hopeful one at the eyepiece.

Bringing it back to the backyard

You will not add Euclid's quasars to an observing log, and that is fine. The takeaway is the idea, that when you look up you are always looking into the past, and that a wide, patient survey of the sky finds treasures a narrow gaze would never reach. Chase 3C 273 on a clear Virgo night and you hold a small piece of that same truth in your eyepiece: a single point of light that crossed billions of years to land on your retina. New to all this? Our beginner's guide to stargazing is the place to start.

Clear skies, and keep looking up. If you would like to observe with us, learn more about our editorial team and club or return to the latest guides on the home page.