A quasar emits exceptional amounts of energy generated by matter falling into a supermassive black hole, as seen in this illustration released on July 6, 2026.
| Photo Credit:
NASA
A quasar — among the
universe’s most luminous and energetic objects — is a
supermassive black hole caught in the act of guzzling matter at
the heart of a galaxy. Scientists have now found quasars dating
to so early in cosmic history that they are baffled as to how
they already existed at that primordial time.
Using the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope,
researchers said they have identified 31 ancient quasars,
observations that add to the mystery of how the universe was far
more advanced in its earliest stages than previously believed.
These included the two earliest quasars known, dating to a
bit more than 13.1 billion years ago when the universe was 5% of
its current age, about 670 million years after the inceptive Big
Bang event. They both shine with a brightness about a trillion
times greater than the sun’s.
Quasars like these are powered by black holes hundreds of
millions to billions of times the sun’s mass, though the masses
of these two have yet to be precisely measured.
“A quasar is the blazing core of a galaxy,” said Daming
Yang, a doctoral student in astrophysics at Leiden University’s
Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands and lead author of the
study published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.
“At the center sits a giant black hole. Black holes
themselves are dark, but the black hole’s gravity pulls in gas
and dust, which spiral toward it like water going down a drain.
As this happens, the gas gets incredibly hot and shines
brighter than the entire galaxy around it,” Yang said.
The two earliest ones described in the study date to a
chapter in the universe’s history that scientists call the
“epoch of reionization,” or cosmic dawn.
“The universe back then was much smaller and denser, and
filled with a fog of neutral hydrogen. It was also a time of
rapid change: the first stars, galaxies and black holes were
lighting up and burning away that fog, transforming the universe
into the transparent one we see today,” Yang said.
During this time, hydrogen atoms were stripped of their
electrons and put into the state in which most hydrogen in
intergalactic space remains today.
A DEEPENING MYSTERY
Scientists in recent years, through observations by the
James Webb Space Telescope and Euclid among others, have gained
a greater understanding of the universe’s earliest stages. It
possessed mature galaxies and, as the new study illustrates,
hungry and huge supermassive black holes inside them.
“Everything was packed into a much smaller volume since the
universe has expanded roughly eightfold in linear scale since
then,” said astrophysicist and study co-author Joseph Hennawi of
the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Leiden
University.
“The most important thing these distant quasars tell us is
that these supermassive black holes were already present in the
extremely early cosmic times. This does not provide very much
time to grow these objects, because the universe is simply too
young. This is a major unsolved problem in astrophysics,”
Hennawi said.
Having early supermassive black holes of this scale pushes
the current understanding of black hole growth to its limits.
“Either the first black holes were born already massive
through some exotic channel, or they grew much faster than we
thought possible. Every step further back in time makes that
puzzle harder,” Yang said. “That is precisely the core mystery
of these objects. And honestly, this study deepens it rather
than solving it.”
The earliest galaxies differed from the grand spiral and
giant elliptical structures seen today. They were comparatively
smaller, though richer in the gas that drove star formation.
As is still the case today, at the center of each of those
galaxies sits a supermassive black hole. Our own Milky Way
galaxy has one at its core, called Sagittarius A*, though it is
in a quiescent phase.
Euclid was launched in 2023 mainly to investigate the
mysterious cosmic components called dark energy and dark matter,
but it has observed quasars, providing a scientific bonus.
“Before Euclid, decades of searching by the whole
astronomical community had yielded only a handful of quasars
from the early era, limited mainly by the telescopes available.
“With this sample, we are entering a new era: studying these
earliest supermassive black holes as a population, and finally
addressing how they were born and grew so quickly when the
universe was very young,” Yang said.
Published on July 8, 2026
