31 Ancient Quasars Found Shining Like a Trillion Suns

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Imagine gazing across more than 13 billion light-years of space-time to witness cosmic beacons burning with the ferocious energy of a trillion Suns. This is not science fiction; it is the latest milestone in modern astrophysics. The European Space Agency (ESA) has announced that its Euclid space telescope has uncovered an unprecedented treasure trove of 31 ancient quasars dating back to the infancy of the cosmos.

Some of these extraordinarily luminous objects were already blazing across the dark void when the Universe was a mere 670 million years old—roughly 5% of its current 13.8-billion-year age. According to a report published on ScienceDaily, this discovery includes two record-breaking quasars that push the boundaries of observational astronomy, offering scientists a direct window into a profound cosmic mystery: how monstrous black holes and massive galaxies assembled themselves so rapidly after the Big Bang.



What Are Quasars and Why Do They Shine So Brightly?

To grasp the magnitude of Euclid’s achievement, it helps to understand what a quasar actually is. Short for "quasi-stellar radio source," a quasar represents the hyperactive, blazing core of a young, distant galaxy. At the heart of nearly every large galaxy lies a supermassive black hole weighing millions or even billions of times more than our Sun. While most black holes today—including Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way—are relatively quiet, the black holes powering ancient quasars were engaged in a relentless feeding frenzy.

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As colossal torrents of primordial gas, dust, and shredded stars spiral inward toward a supermassive black hole, intense gravitational forces and friction compress the matter into a swirling vortex known as an accretion disk. This disk heats up to millions of degrees, unleashing staggering quantities of electromagnetic radiation across the spectrum, from X-rays to infrared light.

During this brief yet violent phase of galactic evolution, a single quasar can outshine its entire host galaxy by a factor of hundreds or even thousands. Their immense brightness allows them to act as cosmic lighthouses, remaining detectable across billions of light-years even when the galaxies surrounding them are too faint for our telescopes to resolve directly.

Breaking Records at the Dawn of Time

Before the launch of the ESA Euclid space telescope in 2023, hunting for quasars in the early Universe was a painstaking, needle-in-a-haystack endeavor. Because the Universe is expanding, light emitted by distant objects stretches as it travels through space—a phenomenon astronomers measure as redshift. The higher the redshift value, the farther away the object is, and the further back in time we are seeing it.

Astronomers spent more than a decade piecing together a collection of roughly ten quasars with a redshift of 7 or higher, corresponding to the first 770 million years after the Big Bang. In just a single year of observations, Euclid has shattered that pace, identifying 31 ancient quasars in total—including 12 with a redshift of 7 or above.

Two of the newly discovered objects have officially claimed the title of the most ancient quasars ever observed:

  • EUCL J172902.75+641018.1: Clocking in at a record-shattering redshift of 7.77, this cosmic titan was already shining brightly when the Universe was just 670 million years old.
  • EUCL J125308.55+705432.3: Holding a close second with a redshift of 7.69, this object easily surpasses the previous record holder from 2021 (which had a redshift of 7.64).
"This finding more than doubles the number of quasars we know of that are so ancient. The Euclid team has taken a true 'census' of quasars at the dawn of the Universe for the first time. It's a big step towards understanding these fascinating objects on a more fundamental level." — Antonio La Marca, ESA Research Fellow

Uncovering a Hidden Population in the Early Universe

One of the most transformative aspects of this breakthrough is not just the age of these quasars, but their diversity. Historically, ground-based telescopes and older space observatories could only detect the absolute brightest, most extreme quasars in the distant cosmos. This created a severe observational bias: astronomers were only seeing the "giants" while missing the vast majority of ordinary, fainter quasars.

Euclid overcomes this hurdle through its unique combination of wide-field vision and deep near-infrared sensitivity. Lead author Daming Yang of Leiden University noted that while previous surveys could only capture a handful of hyper-luminous outliers, Euclid can sweep across enormous expanses of sky to pick up much fainter signatures. By capturing both the brightest beacons and their dimmer counterparts, astronomers finally have a statistically representative sample of the ancient quasar population.

Distinguishing these distant relics from much closer, cool red stars within our own Milky Way requires immense precision. In infrared images, an ancient quasar and a nearby dwarf star can look deceptively similar. Thanks to Euclid’s sharp optical resolution and the collaborative data-processing efforts of thousands of Euclid Consortium scientists, researchers filtered through mountains of astronomical data to isolate these 31 genuine time capsules.

Solving a Cosmic Mystery: How Did Black Holes Grow So Fast?

Every discovery of a billion-solar-mass black hole existing less than 700 million years after the Big Bang deepens one of astrophysics' greatest puzzles. Under standard models of stellar evolution, a black hole forms when a massive star collapses at the end of its life, leaving behind a "seed" weighing perhaps 10 to 100 solar masses. Even if such a seed fed continuously at the maximum theoretical rate—known as the Eddington limit—it should not have had enough time to balloon to the mass of a billion Suns in just 670 million years.

The existence of 31 ancient quasars in this era forces astrophysicists to test competing theories of black hole formation:

  1. Direct Collapse Black Holes: Did pristine clouds of hydrogen and helium gas in the early Universe collapse directly into massive black hole seeds weighing 10,000 to 100,000 solar masses, bypassing the star-formation phase altogether?
  2. Super-Eddington Accretion: Can early black holes temporarily bypass theoretical radiation limits, swallowing matter in chaotic, ultra-dense bursts without blowing away their own fuel supply?
  3. Rapid Hierarchical Mergers: Did dense clusters of early stars and smaller black holes collide and merge at extraordinary rates within the chaotic environments of protogalaxies?

By analyzing the light spectra and masses of Euclid’s newly cataloged quasars, researchers can now measure how quickly these black holes were growing relative to their host galaxies, bringing us closer to resolving this cosmic mystery.

Clues to the First Galaxies and the Epoch of Reionization

Quasars do not exist in isolation; they are intimately tied to the birth of the first galaxies. Follow-up observations led by researcher Silvia Belladitta on the second-most-ancient quasar in the new catalog (EUCL J125308.55+705432.3) revealed that it sits inside a dynamic galaxy rich in gas and cosmic dust, where new stars are igniting at a furious pace. Studying this turbulent nursery allows scientists to see how supermassive black holes and their host galaxies co-evolved from the very beginning.

Furthermore, these 31 beacons provide vital clues about a pivotal chapter in cosmic history called the epoch of reionization. Roughly 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the Universe cooled enough for protons and electrons to combine into neutral hydrogen atoms, plunging the cosmos into the "Cosmic Dark Ages." For hundreds of millions of years, no stars or galaxies shone, and a thick fog of neutral hydrogen absorbed ultraviolet light.

As the first stars, galaxies, and quasars ignited, their intense ultraviolet radiation began stripping electrons away from hydrogen atoms—a process known as ionization. Gradually, bubbles of ionized, transparent space expanded and overlapped until the entire Universe became clear to light, transforming into the transparent cosmos we observe today. Mapping the exact number and brightness of ancient quasars helps astronomers determine how much energy black holes contributed to clearing away that primordial fog.

What Comes Next for the Euclid Wide Survey?

Remarkably, these 31 discoveries represent only the opening chapter of Euclid’s mission. All 31 quasars were extracted from early data collected by the Euclid Wide Survey, an ambitious multi-year mapping campaign designed to chart more than one-third of the entire night sky.

While Euclid’s primary scientific objective is to investigate the elusive nature of dark matter and dark energy by measuring the shapes and distances of billions of galaxies, its wide-field infrared eyes are proving to be an unmatched engine for serendipitous discovery. As the telescope continues scanning the heavens, astronomers anticipate uncovering hundreds more ancient quasars, alongside prime targets for detailed spectroscopic follow-up using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and massive ground-based observatories.

As ESA Euclid Project Scientist Valeria Pettorino aptly summarized, ancient quasars serve as literal time machines. Through Euclid's lens, humanity is watching the dawn of cosmic structure unfold in real time—one trillion-Sun beacon at a time.

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