The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope has identified 31 new quasars in the distant early Universe, including two that now rank as the most ancient quasars ever observed — objects that were already shining when the cosmos was just 670 million years old, roughly 5% of its current age. The results, published on 6 July 2026 in Astronomy & Astrophysics, come from the Euclid Wide Survey, and the underlying catalogue is being made available to the research community as part of ESA’s public data release programme for the mission.
What Euclid found
Quasars are the extraordinarily luminous cores of galaxies powered by supermassive black holes actively feeding on surrounding gas and dust. The two record-setting objects in this sample — designated EUCL J172902.75+641018.1 and EUCL J125308.55+705432.3, at redshifts of 7.77 and 7.69 respectively — are reported by the Euclid Consortium to have “shone with the light of a trillion Suns,” and surpass the previous most-distant confirmed quasar record set in 2021.
Beyond the two record-holders, the broader sample of 31 newly identified quasars includes 12 at redshift 7 or higher — a threshold that, according to the consortium, took astronomers working with earlier ground- and space-based surveys more than a decade to reach just 10 such objects. Euclid’s wide-field infrared imaging is what changes that pace: rather than targeting individual candidate fields, the telescope surveys huge contiguous areas of sky at once, which lets researchers pick out the faint, reddened light of these extremely distant objects far more efficiently than pointed, narrow-field searches allow.
Why this matters for research administration
For readers whose interest is less in the astrophysics and more in how large international science missions are actually organised and funded, the notable elements of this result are structural rather than purely observational:
- Scale of collaboration. The Euclid Consortium is reported by ESA to comprise more than 2,000 scientists across roughly 300 institutes in 15 European countries, plus the United States, Canada, and Japan. ESA leads and operates the mission, with contributions from NASA.
- Survey-based discovery, not single-target proposals. This result did not come from a competitively awarded observing run pointed at a known target. It came from mining a wide-area survey — the Euclid Wide Survey, which is designed to eventually cover more than a third of the sky — for objects that met specific colour and brightness criteria consistent with very high-redshift quasars, then following up spectroscopically to confirm distance.
- Public data release. Euclid’s survey data and derived catalogues are released to the wider astronomical community on a defined schedule as part of ESA’s open-data commitments for the mission, rather than being reserved exclusively to consortium members. That is what allows results like this quasar catalogue to be independently checked, reused, and built on by researchers outside the original discovery team — a data-sharing model that research funders and institutions increasingly expect from large publicly funded facilities.
The source
The findings are described in a paper published 6 July 2026 in Astronomy & Astrophysics (DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202658883), and summarised in ESA’s own announcement, “Euclid discovers the most ancient quasar in the Universe.”
Frequently asked questions
What is a quasar?
A quasar is the extremely bright, compact core of a galaxy, powered by a supermassive black hole pulling in surrounding gas and dust. The infalling material heats up and radiates enormous amounts of light across the electromagnetic spectrum, making quasars visible across vast cosmic distances even though the black holes themselves emit no light directly.
Why does redshift indicate age or distance?
As the Universe expands, light from very distant objects is stretched to longer, redder wavelengths — an effect called redshift. Because light travels at a finite speed, observing a highly redshifted object also means observing it as it existed billions of years in the past. A redshift of roughly 7.7, as reported for these two quasars, corresponds to an era when the Universe was only about 670 million years old.
How is Euclid different from other telescopes searching for distant quasars?
Euclid is designed for wide-field surveying rather than narrow, deep pointing at single targets. Its combination of a large field of view and sensitive infrared imaging allows it to scan huge swaths of sky for the faint, reddened signatures of extremely distant objects, which is why this single survey dataset was able to add 31 candidate quasars, including 12 at redshift 7 or above, in a fraction of the time earlier targeted searches required.
Is the underlying data publicly available?
Yes. Euclid’s survey imaging and derived data products, including catalogues such as the one behind this result, are released to the broader research community as part of ESA’s public data release schedule for the mission, rather than being restricted to Euclid Consortium members alone.
