Euclid telescope discovers 31 ancient quasars, two oldest ever observed

The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope has identified 31 new high‑redshift quasars (redshift 6.6‑7.8) in data from its first 1.5 years of the Wide Survey, covering about 3 000 deg². This more than doubles the number of quasars known from the Universe’s first billion years, with 12 objects at redshift ≥ 7. Among the sample, two quasars – EUCL J172902.75+641018.1 (z = 7.77) and EUCL J125308.55+705432.3 (z = 7.69) – set a new record, their light being emitted when the cosmos was roughly 670 million years old, about 5 % of its current age, and now reaching us from over 13 billion light‑years away. The discoveries were confirmed with follow‑up spectroscopy from ground‑based facilities such as Keck, Magellan and the Large Binocular Telescope. Lead author Daming Yang of Leiden University said, “By finding and studying them, we can better understand how these enormous systems formed and grew so quickly – one of the greatest mysteries in astrophysics.” The enlarged sample provides a statistical basis for probing early supermassive black‑hole growth and the epoch of reionisation, offering new insight into the infancy of galaxies and the evolution of the dark Universe.