ESA’s Euclid Spies Oldest Quasars In The Known Universe: New YouTube Video…

The universe as we know it was only about six per cent of its present age.

A mere baby — with very chaotic quasars generating unimaginably vast light blasts, which helped form the later generations of stars and galaxies… and yes, planetary systems — like our own. Here’s the story — and video, of Euclid’s latest ground-breaking learnings:

…Quasars represent a brief phase in a galaxy’s life during which large amounts of material spiral into the central supermassive black hole, releasing enormous amounts of energy. In this phase, the galaxy’s nucleus shines more brightly than anything else in the Universe, often outshining the rest of its host galaxy by hundreds to thousands of times.

We’ve been hunting for the Universe’s very first quasars for decades. These objects reveal what was happening during the earliest days of the cosmos, including how the first supermassive black holes and galaxies took shape. However, quasars from this time are difficult to find. They’re rare, as few galaxies had yet had time to grow big enough, and their primordial light is both faint and easy to confuse with that from stars lying closer to us.

Euclid, launched in 2023, is digging deeper into this mystifying part of ancient cosmic history – with exciting results. The telescope has now discovered an unprecedented number of 31 new quasars in the early Universe, pushing back to a time when the cosmos was just about 6% of its current age….