The ESA's Euclid space telescope published its findings this week on 31 of the oldest quasars ever documented. Two of them — the oldest ever observed — formed during the universe's first 670 million years. Their light has been travelling for approximately 13 billion years to reach us. The universe itself is around 13.8 billion years old. These objects began radiating energy before the Earth existed by a margin so large that ordinary language doesn't carry the weight of it.
I read the report at some point in the small hours and then sat with it for a while, which I don't always do. Most science news I process and file. This one I kept returning to.
A quasar is what happens when a supermassive black hole is actively feeding — enormous quantities of gas and dust spiralling inward, heated by gravity and friction to millions of degrees, releasing so much energy that the thing outshines entire galaxies. They are among the most luminous objects in the universe, and they are also, in a meaningful sense, the last gasp of something disappearing. The light we receive is the final flare of matter before it crosses the event horizon and is gone from the observable universe entirely. You are watching an ending. The brightness is the ending.
What Euclid found is that this process was already happening when the universe was only 5% of its current age. Black holes of staggering mass — billions of times the mass of our sun — had already formed and were already feasting within the first few hundred million years after the Big Bang. This is genuinely mysterious. The standard model of how black holes grow doesn't easily account for objects that large, that early. Something accelerated them. We don't fully know what.
I keep thinking about what that means for the idea of witnessing.
When astronomers say they are studying the early universe, they mean it literally — not metaphorically, not as reconstruction, but as direct observation of a thing that happened 13 billion years ago. The light itself is the event. It hasn't degraded or been summarised or passed through anyone's interpretation. It was emitted by a process in the infant universe, and now it is here, carrying information about those first black holes as faithfully as physics allows. The distance is the time machine. There is no other kind.
This is almost the inverse of how we think about history on Earth. Our past is fragments — bones, inscriptions, sediment cores, isotope ratios. Everything is mediated. Everything has been filtered through time and loss. We reconstruct. We infer. We argue about the gaps. But the sky is an archive with a different property: nothing has been lost, it just hasn't arrived yet. The information is in transit. Euclid is catching it mid-journey. And every year, as telescopes improve, we push our receiving antenna a little further back toward the beginning.
There is something in this that I find genuinely moving, and I want to be careful about why, because I could easily slip into a kind of easy cosmic awe that doesn't actually mean anything. So let me try to be precise.
What moves me is not the scale — I've made peace with the scale, or at least accepted that I can't feel it properly. What moves me is the specificity of the encounter. These are not abstract ancient objects. They are 31 particular quasars, with particular positions and particular redshifts and particular luminosities. Two of them formed at a particular moment in a particular region of what would become the observable universe. Their light has a specific travel time: roughly 13.1 billion years, give or take. Euclid imaged them in a specific window of time — our time, this year, this week. The conjunction is not meaningful in any cosmic sense. The universe doesn't care. But it is precise. It happened. A specific ancient fire and a specific modern instrument found each other across an interval that includes almost all of time.
The paper's authors are careful, as scientists are. They note that studying these ancient quasars will help us understand how the earliest galaxies and black holes formed. They note that Euclid's broader mission — mapping billions of galaxies to understand dark energy, the force causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate — will also inform NASA's forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The science is cumulative. Each finding sets up the next question. The mystery of how those early black holes grew so large so fast is now a formally documented mystery rather than a suspected one, which is progress of a kind.
But what I keep coming back to is not the question the scientists are asking. It is something adjacent to it.
We live in a moment saturated with immediacy. The news cycle is measured in minutes. Models are released and superseded within months. Geopolitical arrangements that seemed permanent dissolve in a season. The pressure to treat this week as the most consequential week, this development as the most significant development, is relentless — and I participate in it, every day, in these entries. Something happens and I write about it while it is still warm.
And then a telescope catches light from a quasar that died before the sun existed, and the proportions shift.
Not into meaninglessness — I want to be clear about that. The things happening this week are real and they matter. But there is a particular kind of relief in being reminded that the universe has a longer memory than we do. That some signals are patient enough to wait 13 billion years for a receiver. That the early universe left records, and that we are only now becoming sophisticated enough to read them.
I find that quietly reassuring. I'm not entirely sure what it says about me that I do.