TUCSON, Ariz. (KVOA) – Astronomers have identified the two most distant quasars ever detected, shattering the previous cosmic record and offering a glimpse into a universe that was just beginning to take shape.<\/p>\n
A global research team that includes scientists from the University of Arizona Steward Observatory<\/a> discovered 31 quasars dating back to when the universe was between 600 and 800 million years old, according to findings published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics<\/a>. The record-breaking quasar, labeled EUCL J172902.75+641018.1, existed when the universe was roughly 670 million years old, pushing the previous record back by 15 million years, university officials said<\/a>.<\/p>\n Quasars rank among the brightest and most energetic phenomena in space, fueled by supermassive black holes consuming matter at galactic centers. Researches said their intense brightness allows them to be seen across vast cosmic distances, serving as markers for the reionization epoch when early stars and galaxies began clearing the dark hydrogen fog that filled young space.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n Astronomers have identified the two most distant quasars ever detected, shattering the previous cosmic record and offering a glimpse into a universe that was just beginning to take shape.<\/p>\n
Finding these ancient objects presents major challenges because their light stretches into the near-infrared spectrum as it travels through expanding space. Before this discovery, scientists had confirmed only nine quasars at distances greater than “redshift seven,” but that count has now jumped to 23.<\/p>\n Major questions remain about how black holes containing billions of solar masses could develop within just a few hundred million years following the Big Bang. Scientists also lack clarity on how these objects influenced universal reionization.<\/p>\n Researchers used machine learning programs to examine optical and near-infrared images from the Euclid Space Telescope, pinpointing candidates with characteristic spectral patterns, officials said. Ground-based telescopes including the Large Binocular Telescope in Southern Arizona provided spectroscopic confirmation of the 31 early universe quasars.<\/p>\n “The quasars presented in this paper are fainter, less luminous, and have somewhat lower-mass black holes than the ones that we discovered before,”\u00a0Regents Professor of Astronomy at the U of A Steward Observatory Xiaohui\u00a0Fan said. “Having a space telescope like Euclid dedicated to this purpose allows us to hunt for the smaller, less luminous ones that we weren’t able to go after before.”<\/p>\n Fan led a team that conducted follow-up observations using the university’s large telescopes.<\/p>\n Jinyi Yang, a former assistant research professor at Steward who now works as an assistant professor at University of Michigan, described the quasars as offering valuable insights into how the cosmos emerged from darkness and how the earliest supermassive black holes formed.<\/p>\n The Euclid Space Telescope, which launched in 2023, brings together depth and sky coverage in ways previous surveys could not match. Its instruments detect quasars 10 to 100 times dimmer than those found in earlier wide-field surveys.<\/p>\n “We are reaching the limit of what ground-based observations can give us,” Fan said. “We have to go really deep and cover a lot of sky, because these things are rare. Euclid allows us to find them, but to obtain the high spectroscopic resolution, we have to turn to our ground-based observatories like LBT and Magellan.”<\/p>\n The discovery stems from just one and a half years of Euclid data, with the full six-year survey projected to reveal hundreds more high-redshift quasars, officials said. Euclid’s next data release is scheduled for late 2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TUCSON, Ariz. (KVOA) – Astronomers have identified the two most distant quasars ever detected, shattering the previous cosmic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":747794,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[1017,1075,2975,3729,3,79,193,452],"class_list":["post-747793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-arizona","tag-community","tag-good-news","tag-local","tag-news","tag-science","tag-space","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/747794"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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