Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2026

7 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 ASTRO PUBLISHING s e l v e s , but also time machines that en- able us to explore the early Universe and understand how the first generation of galaxies came to be,” says ESA Euclid Project Scientist Valeria Pettorino. “Euclid’s capabil- ities are unrivalled. The telescope combines a large area, depth, sharp imaging, and unique space-based infrared vision in a way that lets us pick out rare, extremely distant ob- jects far more efficiently than be- fore. And it’s not just the telescope: the data processing is only possible thanks to thousands of Euclid Con- sortium scientists and engineers working together to deliver scien- tific discoveries, sifting through enormous datasets to identify rare, distant quasars that we can study further using telescopes on the ground.” The 31 quasars reported here were discovered in data from the Euclid Wide Survey, which will cover more than one-third of the total sky once complete. Euclid will reveal the se- crets of the dark Universe; the tele- scope is exploring its composition, history, evolution, and mapping out its large-scale structure, observing billions of galaxies – and revealing many quasars – as it does so. as the ‘epoch of reionisation’: when everything shifted from being cold and dark (the ‘dark ages’) to hot and ‘ionised’ (split apart by energetic light). This transitional epoch was a crucial era that set the stage for everything we see today. “Ancient quasars are rare discover- ies. They’re interesting in them- ! tively, set- ting a new record for the most ancient quasars ever found. Both lie just over 13 billion light- years away, and emerged during the Universe’s first 670 million years. “This finding more than doubles the number of quasars we know of that are so ancient,” says Antonio La Marca, an ESA Research Fellow in the Euclid team. Discovering the first 10 or so quasars at a redshift of 7 or above took astronomers more than a decade – but Euclid has al- ready discovered more than that in a single year. “The Euclid team has taken a true ‘census’ of quasars at the dawn of the Universe for the first time,” adds Antonio. “It’s a big step towards un- derstanding these fascinating objects on a more fundamental level.” The second most ancient quasar found by Daming and colleagues was recently studied in more detail by Silvia Belladitta and collabora- tors. These observations showed that the quasar is embedded in a dusty, gas-filled galaxy that is furi- ously forming new stars, hinting at what the host galaxy of an early su- permassive black hole may be like. The quasars hark back to a fascinat- ing period in cosmic history known T his graphic shows the location of the 31 newly discovered quasars (yellow dots) by Euclid, and the mis- sion’s survey footprint in August 2025 (blue area). The locations of the farthest found quasars are shown as red dots. The farthest quasar is the one on the right and is named EUCL J172902.75+641018.1 (redshift of 7.77), and the second-farthest (the red dot on the left) is named EUCL J125308.55+705432.3 (redshift of 7.69). This all-sky view is overlaid on ESA Planck’s map from 2014, with the bright horizontal band corre- sponding to the plane of our Milky Way galaxy, where most of its stars reside. [ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consor- tium/NASA/Planck Collaboration/A. Mellinger; Acknowledgment: Jean- Charles Cuillandre, João Dinis)]