Probing the dawn of the cosmos for clues to the formation of the first galaxies and supermassive black holes is no easy task.
By Adam Kovac edited by Claire Cameron
This artist’s concept shows a quasar, which is a galaxy with large amounts of matter spiraling into its central supermassive black hole. Extreme gravitational and frictional forces heat the material to millions of degrees, generating more light than all the stars in the galaxy combined.
ESA
At the heart of many galaxies are supermassive black holes. These engines power quasars, active galactic nuclei that emit some of the brightest lights astronomers can see in the sky. How these extreme objects formed during the early years of the universe, when the cosmos was less than a billion years old, has long been a mystery.
But now the European Space Agency Euclid Space Telescope identified a brood of primordials quasarsdating from around 13 billion years ago, placing them among the oldest objects ever discovered in the universe.
Ancient quasars offer a glimpse of the universe in its chaotic beginnings; but finding these primordial objects can be very difficult. Because they formed so long ago, they are extremely far from Earth, which can cause their bright light to be mistaken for the signal of a more ordinary celestial object.
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Quasars from the early cosmos are among the rarest known objects in the universe, and they emit light in a specific energy band that tends to elude ground-based telescopes.
From its vantage point in space, just under a million kilometers from Earth, the Euclid Telescope has a unique view, said Eduardo Bañados, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and co-leader of the Euclid Quasar Working Group from 2022 to 2025. He is also co-author of a new study detailing the results.
“Seeing Euclid realize his potential is extremely satisfying,” Bańados said in a statement. “But more than that, it marks a real change: for the first time, we can study typical quasars of the early universe, not just exceptional outliers. We now have a real window into how the bulk of early black holes developed – and how they shaped the galaxies around them.”
Euclid is equipped with cameras capable of seeing both visible light and near-infrared light. Starting in February 2024, the team launched a six-year project called the Euclid Wide Survey, aiming to map a swath of extragalactic space. When finished, it will have mapped about a third of the sky. Two years later, the survey revealed 31 ancient quasars dating back to the dawn of the universe. THE the results have been published Monday at Astronomy and astrophysics.
Incredibly, 12 of the quasars discovered by Euclid date from the first 770 million years of the universe, while two others appear to have formed when the universe was only 670 million years old. This makes them almost as old as the oldest known galaxies.
There could be even older quasars. In the new study, the team observes that the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes have equipment sensitive enough to potentially detect even fainter emissions than Euclid.
“These objects provide the best clues to understanding how supermassive black holes form,” said the study co-author. Joseph Hennawijointly appointed professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Leiden University in Germany, in a declaration. Future research – and deeper study of the universe’s past – could offer more clues, he added.
“Each step back in time makes the puzzle more perplexing: how did the Universe produce supermassive black holes so quickly? » said Hennawi. “We are discovering black holes with masses hundreds of millions of times that of our sun at a time when the universe was just beginning.”
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