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Telescope spots most distant quasars ever discovered

▶ Watch Video: Europe’s Euclid space telescope launched by SpaceX

The Euclid space telescope has spotted the oldest quasars — the brightest objects in the universe — ever discovered, deepening a cosmic mystery that has been puzzling scientists.

Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes at the heart of early galaxies gobbling up surrounding matter in a colossal feeding frenzy that can shine trillions of times brighter than the sun.

Because they are so incredibly bright — and looking deep into space also means looking back in time — scientists have been hunting for ancient quasars to learn more about the little-understood infancy of the universe.

In a study published on Monday, an international team of astronomers announced they had discovered 31 quasars, including the two oldest observed yet, using the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope, which is at a stable hovering spot around 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

The light from the oldest pair comes from when the universe was roughly 670 million years old, just five percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years.  

This beats the team’s previous record for oldest — and therefore most distant — quasar announced in 2021 by around 20 million years.

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This collage shows 15 of the 31 newly discovered quasars by the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. 

European Space Agency

Previous quasar hunts were mostly carried out with ground-based telescopes, but the launch of Euclid in 2023 “has transformed this field,” Daming Yang, the lead author of the study in Astronomy & Astrophysics, told AFP.

In just two years, Euclid has doubled the number of ancient quasars known to science, added Yang, a PhD student at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

“Euclid is a true game-changer,” Yang said in a statement. “Before, we could only find a handful of the very brightest ancient quasars, but Euclid lets us search far more efficiently across huge areas of sky to capture much fainter light. It’s a unique tool for quasar hunting.”

Cosmic quandary

The newly discovered quasars date back to what is known as the epoch of reionization. This when the first stars and galaxies began to form, bringing an end to the cosmic dark ages.

“We can use quasars as a lighthouse to study the gas between us and them, so that we can trace how the universe was reionized through this cosmic history,” Daming Yang said.

The quasars are also the latest example of a problem that has been increasingly baffling scientists.

As more powerful telescopes allow us to see further back in time, galaxies and other cosmic objects have turned out to be far bigger than had been thought possible at such an early age.

“Every step further back in time makes the puzzle more perplexing,” study co-author Joseph Hennawi said in a statement about the newly discovered quasars.

“These monsters — weighing billions of times the mass of our sun — somehow already existed when the universe was in its infancy,” he said. “We don’t yet have a good understanding of how they grew so massive, so fast.”

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Artist’s concept of an ancient quasar

European Space Agency

Hoping to find an answer, the scientists are searching for even older quasars.

The far-seeing James Webb space telescope also recently observed the newly announced quasars, Daming said, and the team will soon begin sifting through the data it collected.

The team eventually hope to stitch together “a quasar chronicle of the first billion years,” Hennawi said.

Euclid’s cosmic mission

Euclid launched in 2023 on a mission to chart one-third of the sky in the hopes of shedding light on the enduring mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

Just last month, scientists announced the Euclid telescope had captured the largest and most detailed photo ever taken of our galaxy’s crowded heart, a dazzling image packed with 60 million stars, the European Space Agency said Wednesday.

In 2024, Euclid captured dazzling photos of the cosmos, including an image of a massive cluster of galaxies called Abell 2390. The image of the cluster, which is 2.7 billion light years away from Earth, encompasses more than 50,000 galaxies.

Another jaw-dropping image, captured in 2023, provides a spectacular wide-angle view of the Perseus galaxy cluster, revealing at least 1,000 gravitationally-bound galaxies with another 100,000 or so sprinkled across the more distant background — many of them never before seen.

Launched from Cape Canaveral on July 1, 2023 atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the $1.5 billion Euclid is stationed about a million miles from Earth on the far side of the moon’s orbit.

Over the course of its six-year mission, the observatory will image the entire sky around the Milky Way, monitoring galaxies and galaxy clusters dating back 10 billion years.

Europe’s economy faces a one-two punch from extreme weather and war

By CNN
London (CNN) — Nuclear power plants idled. Crops harvested at 3 a.m. Iconic tourist attractions shuttered early.Soaring temperatures are forcing drastic measures in Europe, where successive heatwaves are straining an economy already under pressure from US tariffs, Chinese competition and higher energy prices because of the Iran war.Romania’s state-owned nuclear power producer Nuclearelectrica started disconnecting its sole operational reactor from the power grid Thursday because of record-low water levels in the Danube, crucial for cooling its equipment, the company confirmed to CNN. The country has declared a state of energy emergency throughout August and asked businesses and households to voluntarily reduce consumption, Reuters reported.Elsewhere, France and Hungary have had to curtail nuclear power due to low river levels and high temperatures. Drought conditions are also fueling devastating, costly wildfires and reducing crop yields, threatening to push up food prices.Europe’s sweltering summer could cost the economy €180 billion ($208 billion) this year, or 1% of GDP – roughly the entire expected economic growth of the European Union, according to an estimate by Netherlands-based Triodos Bank. “Lower labor productivity is likely to have the largest economic impact, alongside disruptions to agriculture, energy and transport,” the bank said in a report this month.Swaths of Europe are enduring their fifth heatwave of the year this week, with parts of Britain, France, Spain and Italy under extreme heat warnings. The latest scorcher comes after Western Europe recorded its hottest June and July on record, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitor. In Paris, extreme heat prompted the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre to close early on some days.While some analysts doubt the heat will have a sizeable impact on economic growth this year, pointing to improved business confidence in July and increased GDP in the first half, hot weather is not the only economic threat.Europeans also face the prospect of hikes to their energy bills this winter, as natural gas prices climb. The price of benchmark natural gas futures traded near their highest levels since the start of the Iran war this week, and almost twice as high as the same time last year.The war in the Middle East has made cargoes more scarce and, in turn, more expensive, raising the prospects of another energy crunch. Blistering heat has also raised demand for air conditioning, driving up natural gas consumption at a time when stores need to be refilled ahead of winter.“The EU natural gas market is vulnerable looking ahead to peak winter demand,” Kieran Tompkins, senior climate and commodities economist at Capital Economics wrote in a note earlier this month. “Storage levels are the lowest for this point in the year for over a decade.”Dry rivers, overnight farmingThe Danube is not the only critical European waterway drying out as a result of a prolonged drought.In Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, record-low water levels in the Rhine – an important transport route for industrial goods such as steel and chemicals – could shave 0.3 percentage points off the country’s GDP growth this year, according to economists at pan-European bank ING. That would be a heavy blow for an economy growing at less than 1% a year.BASF, the German chemicals giant, said it may be unable to fulfil orders of some chemical compounds because the Rhine’s low water levels have restricted the supply of certain key raw materials.“We are… shifting volumes to alternative modes of transport such as trucks and rail,” the company told CNN, noting that it was also using a greater number of vessels specifically designed to navigate shallow waters. A number of German states have temporarily suspended Sunday driving bans for trucks in an emergency effort to mitigate supply chain disruption.The European Commission said earlier this year that EU member states should be investing about €70 billion ($81 billion) per year to 2050 in climate adaptation — spending that could boost economies but will also pile pressure on strained government budgets.Some companies have already started adapting in innovative ways. In England, a notoriously rainy part of the world, family-owned Rookery Farm is harvesting its crop at 3 a.m. to ensure it has sufficient moisture content.“Harvest is no longer just about dodging the rain – we’re now adapting to crops that can become too dry, meaning more night-time harvesting to meet the quality standards our customers require,” farmer Eleanor Gilbert said in a video posted to Instagram.High energy prices aheadAs Europe grapples with successive heatwaves, it also faces the prospects of a winter energy crunch. Gas storage levels across the EU were 59% full on Tuesday, according to data from Gas Infrastructure Europe — well below the average for this time of year and on par with levels seen during summer 2021, when Russia had begun restricting exports to the continent.“I’m really concerned,” Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a researcher at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, said of the EU’s ability to replenish diminished stocks.“There have been very few cargoes… exiting the Strait of Hormuz. All of them are going to Asia,” she told CNN.Summer is primetime in Europe for stocking up on gas before the colder winter months, when prices are often considerably higher. Yet the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively shut, choking off one fifth of the world’s supply of liquefied natural gas — a liquid form of the fuel carried by tankers.Remaining cargoes, such as those from the United States, are also more likely to head for Asia than Europe, say analysts, because demand there is particularly strong and buyers are stumping up more.But this is “not a ’22 crisis,” said Christoph Halser, senior analyst of gas and LNG research at Rystad Energy, referring to that year’s historic price spikes in Europe following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.Since then, the continent has greatly reduced its imports of Moscow’s gas — the bulk of which arrived via pipelines — as well as reduced its overall consumption.“Gas demand in Europe today is roughly 20% lower than, let’s say, in 2021,” Halser told CNN.Massimo Di Odoardo, vice president of gas and LNG research at Wood Mackenzie, is also confident that Europe will avoid a dire scenario of energy shortages and blackouts.The risk of shortages are “overstated” he said, adding that the region has the means to “buy itself out” of any such predicament.Still, prices are unnervingly elevated.The price of Europe’s benchmark natural gas contract settled at €61 ($70) per megawatt hour on Wednesday, well above the €32 ($37) logged on the same day in 2025, according to Intercontinental Exchange data.During the winter, “Europe should be really worried about a situation where the Strait of Hormuz doesn’t open because this could certainly result in prices being extremely high,” Di Odoardo said.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
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