ESA’s Euclid telescope finds 31 ancient quasars, two at record redshifts 7.77 and 7.69
Euclid has found 31 quasars from the Universe’s first few percent of its age, including two record holders at redshifts 7.77 and 7.69 that were already as bright as a trillion Suns. The wider, fainter sample more than doubles the known count of such ancient objects and gives astronomers a less biased look at early black-hole growth.
The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope has identified 31 exceptionally ancient quasars, including two that set records as the earliest known. EUCL J172902.75+641018.1, at redshift 7.77, and EUCL J125308.55+705432.3, at 7.69, were already radiating about as much light as a trillion Suns when the Universe was roughly 670 million years old — about 5 percent of its present age. Both lie just over 13 billion light-years from Earth. Daming Yang of Leiden University is lead author of the discovery paper described in the release.
Redshift measures how cosmic expansion stretches light, so a higher value means an earlier time. Twelve of the 31 have redshift 7 or greater, placing them within the Universe’s first 770 million years. The previous record, an object found in 2021, was redshift 7.64. Antonio La Marca, an ESA research fellow on the Euclid team, said the finding more than doubles the number of known quasars that ancient. Quasars are brief, extremely bright phases when gas falls toward a galaxy’s central supermassive black hole and the core outshines the rest of the galaxy by hundreds or thousands of times.
For decades, searches mostly caught the rarest, brightest objects, because faint early light is hard to separate from ordinary stars. That biased sample made it difficult to say what a typical quasar at cosmic dawn looked like. Euclid, launched in 2023, surveys huge areas of sky and reaches much fainter sources, so these 31 are closer to a census than a highlight reel. Objects this luminous so soon after the Big Bang are exactly the systems astronomers use to test how the first galaxies and their central black holes could assemble so quickly.
These beacons are among the few direct views of the first luminous structures, and a larger, fainter sample changes what that view can support. The public account is a ScienceDaily release, not the full methods section; redshift confirmation, how complete the search was, and black-hole mass estimates are the measurements that set how hard the records push theory. What the release does establish is a jump in the known population at cosmic dawn, not a finished revision of galaxy-formation models.
These quasars are some of the only direct looks at the first bright galaxies and their central black holes. A larger sample that includes fainter objects, not only the easiest-to-spot giants, is what lets astronomers test how those systems grew so early.
Sources (1)
- [1]Euclid discovers ancient cosmic beacons from the dawn of time, shining like a trillion suns(https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/11/261112230504.htm)