A European space telescope built to map dark energy just found the oldest quasars ever seen, spotting 31 of them at once.
Story Snapshot
- The Euclid space telescope found 31 ancient quasars dating back to when the universe was only 670 million years old.
- The find doubles the number of known quasars from that early era of the universe.
- Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe, powered by supermassive black holes billions of times the mass of our sun.
- Euclid was built to study dark energy, not ancient quasars, making this discovery a major bonus for science.
What Euclid Found and Why It Matters
The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope spotted 31 quasars from a time when the universe was just 670 million years old. That is less than 5% of the universe’s current age, about 13.8 billion years. Quasars are the brightest things in the known universe.
They glow with the energy of trillions of suns, all powered by supermassive black holes consuming gas and dust at the centers of early galaxies.
Before this discovery, the record holder was a quasar called J0313-1806, also seen at roughly 670 million years after the Big Bang. What makes the Euclid find extraordinary is not just the age but the sheer number.
Finding 31 quasars from that same ancient window, all at once, effectively doubles the known count from that era. That is not a small update. It is a wholesale expansion of what scientists thought they knew about the early universe.
A Dark Energy Telescope That Accidentally Changed Astronomy
Euclid launched in 2023 with one main job: map the large-scale structure of the universe to study dark energy and dark matter. Nobody sent it up specifically to hunt ancient quasars. That makes this result even more striking.
Euclid’s wide-field infrared camera covers enormous stretches of sky in a single pass, and that breadth is exactly what allowed it to catch so many rare, distant objects that narrower telescopes would have missed entirely.
Oldest quasars ever discovered add to ‘perplexing’ space mystery https://t.co/VYhp4rPZac
— The Straits Times (@straits_times) July 6, 2026
Some astronomers have raised fair questions about whether Euclid, built for wide surveys rather than deep sensitivity, is the right tool for pinning down the faintest objects at the edge of the observable universe.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and Keck Observatory are better suited for the precise follow-up spectroscopy needed to lock in exact distances.
Those follow-up measurements will determine whether these 31 quasars are truly at the same age as J0313-1806 or slightly older, which would make the record claim even stronger.
The “Oldest Ever” Label and What It Actually Means
There is a nuance worth understanding here. The previous record quasar, J0313-1806, was confirmed at a redshift of 670 million years after the Big Bang with a very precise distance measurement.
Reports on the Euclid find also cite 670 million years, which raises a reasonable question: are these quasars older, or are they simply new examples at the same age?
The peer-reviewed paper with specific redshift data for each Euclid quasar has not yet been widely circulated, so the exact ranking remains to be confirmed by independent observation.
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
This kind of nuance is normal in early-universe astronomy. Announcements often come before full peer review, and the numbers sometimes shift slightly after follow-up work. That does not mean the discovery is overblown.
Finding 31 quasars in the universe’s first 670 million years, regardless of whether any one of them edges past J0313-1806 by a few million years, tells scientists that supermassive black holes were forming far faster and in far greater numbers than current models predict. That is the real puzzle, and it is a serious one.
The Black Hole Formation Problem No One Has Solved
Here is what makes all of this genuinely unsettling for physics: supermassive black holes are not supposed to exist that early. Standard models of how black holes grow require billions of years of slow accumulation. J0313-1806’s central black hole already weighed 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun just 670 million years after the Big Bang.
There are now potentially 31 more examples from the same period. Either the models are wrong, or something caused these black holes to grow at a speed that current physics cannot fully explain. Euclid just made that problem much harder to ignore.
