Most Ancient Quasars in the Universe Discovered | Euclid Space Telescope | ESA
In March 2026, the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope discovered 31of the most ancient quasars ever found, more than doubling the number of quasars we know of that are so old. Two of these giant, dazzling, black hole-powered galaxy cores are older than any we have seen before. These cosmic elders shone with the light of a trillion Suns back when the Universe was 670 million years old—just 5% of its current age.
Quasars are distant galaxies whose incredibly bright cores are powered by supermassive black holes. Quasars have been found with luminosities between 10 to 100,000 times that of our Milky Way galaxy, generated from an area just a few light-days to a few light-years across.
Quasars occur when immense amounts of matter fall into a supermassive black hole, spiraling around it in the form of a disk before entering. This “accretion disk” is subjected to extreme gravitational and frictional forces, causing the gas and dust to heat up to millions of degrees and become luminous, blasting out dazzling jets of material into the universe. Together, the jets and glowing disk outshine their host galaxies.
ESA's Euclid Space Telescope:
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid
Source Imagery: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Release Date: July 6, 2026
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