Europe’s Euclid space telescope just found 31 ancient quasars from the universe’s earliest era, doubling what astronomers previously knew about these cosmic giants from the dawn of time.
Story Highlights
- Euclid spotted quasars that existed just 670 million years after the Big Bang, tying the record for the oldest ever found.
- The discovery doubled the number of known early quasars, a major leap in our map of the early universe.
- Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes billions of times heavier than our sun.
- Scientists still need peer-reviewed follow-up data to confirm whether these quasars are truly older than the previous record holder.
What Euclid Found and Why It Matters
The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope found 31 quasars dating back to when the universe was only about 670 million years old. That is less than 5% of the universe’s current age, roughly 13.8 billion years.
To put that in human terms, it is like finding a photo of someone taken within the first four years of their life, when no one even knew they existed yet.
Quasars are not stars. They are the blazing cores of young galaxies, lit by supermassive black holes that swallow enormous amounts of gas and dust. The energy they release outshines entire galaxies.
Finding them this far back in time tells astronomers something important: giant black holes were already forming fast, very early in the universe’s history. That is a puzzle science has not fully solved.
The Previous Record and What Changed
Before this discovery, the oldest known quasar was called J0313-1806. Keck Observatory confirmed it in January 2021. It sits at the same 670-million-year mark and is powered by a black hole that weighs about 1.6 billion times as much as our Sun.
Euclid did not find something older in a strict sense. It found more objects at the same extreme age, doubling the known count of quasars from that era. That is still a big deal, even if the headline “resets the record” is a stretch.
The honest framing here is this: Euclid found many more ancient quasars, not necessarily older ones. Scientists will need detailed follow-up observations from telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to pin down exact ages and confirm the findings. That work takes time.
The announcement came before a peer-reviewed paper was published, which is common in modern astronomy but worth keeping in mind when reading the boldest claims.
Why Euclid Was Not Built for This — But Did It Anyway
Euclid was designed to map dark energy and the large-scale structure of the universe. Think of it as a wide-angle camera built to photograph the cosmic web, not to hunt for faint, ancient pinpoints of light. That makes this discovery even more surprising.
Its wide field of view lets it scan huge patches of sky at once, which is exactly why it found so many ancient quasars that narrower, deeper telescopes like JWST had missed.
The Euclid space telescope has spotted the oldest quasars ever discovered — from when the universe was just 670 million years old, only 5% of its current age .
Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes, shining trillions of times brighter than the Sun. The discovery beats… pic.twitter.com/X8vAeZa25n
— Hype Pakistan (@HypePakistan) July 6, 2026
Some astronomers will rightly ask whether Euclid’s instruments are precise enough to nail down the exact ages of these objects. Redshift measurements, which tell astronomers how far light has traveled, need to be confirmed by other observatories before the record claim is locked in. That skepticism is healthy science, not a reason to dismiss the discovery.
The Bigger Picture Behind the Numbers
Early-universe astronomy has a pattern worth knowing. A telescope announces a record-breaking find. Media runs with it. Then follow-up studies shave a few million years off the claim, and the “oldest ever” becomes “one of the oldest.” This happened with several James Webb Space Telescope galaxy discoveries between 2023 and 2024. It does not mean the science is wrong. It means science is self-correcting, which is a feature, not a flaw.
What matters here is the volume of the find. Doubling the count of known ancient quasars gives researchers far more data to work with. More data means better models of how black holes grew so large so fast.
That question sits at the heart of modern cosmology. Euclid just handed scientists 31 new clues to work with, and that is worth paying attention to, regardless of how the record books ultimately settle.
