The Euclid space telescope has identified 31 quasars from the universe’s infancy, including two that are the most distant ever observed. These objects, powered by supermassive black holes, shone with the intensity of a trillion suns when the cosmos was just 670 million years old—roughly 5 percent of its current age. The discovery, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, was made possible by Euclid’s infrared survey capability, which can distinguish the faint, primordial light of these rare nuclei from the glare of foreground stars. Researchers in the Netherlands and Italy led the analysis, with the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics and numerous universities contributing. The findings offer direct probes of how the first supermassive black holes and galaxies assembled so rapidly, a question that has long challenged cosmological models.

A separate advance has expanded the planet-hunting reach of NASA’s TESS observatory. Using gravitational microlensing—a phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s general relativity in which a massive foreground object bends and amplifies the light of a background star—scientists confirmed a gas-giant planet, Gaia23bra b, orbiting an orange dwarf star roughly 40,000 light-years from Earth. The planet, 1.6 times the mass of Jupiter, lies far beyond the 150-light-year limit of TESS’s primary transit method. A team at the University of New Mexico reported the detection in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, noting that the technique suggests many more such distant worlds may be hiding in existing TESS data. The success serves as a pathfinder for the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which will systematically scour the galactic bulge for microlensing signals.

Closer to home, radio observatories have recorded a rare reawakening. The pulsar nicknamed “Blue Eye,” a rapidly spinning neutron star that had been radio-silent for decades, has begun emitting strong, regular pulses again. Pulsars are known to switch off for extended periods, but the return of detectable emission provides a live laboratory for studying the interior dynamics and magnetic-field reconfigurations of these stellar remnants. Astronomers are now conducting round-the-clock monitoring to capture any further fluctuations in the signal.

Looking ahead, planetary scientists are preparing for the 2029 close approach of asteroid 99942 Apophis. On 13 April of that year, the 340-metre-wide body will pass within 32,000 kilometres of Earth—inside the orbits of geosynchronous satellites—and will be visible to the naked eye across much of the globe. Researchers at MIT and Lowell Observatory note that tidal stresses during the flyby could alter the asteroid’s rotation, trigger seismic shaking, or even cause surface landslides. With impact risk ruled out for at least a century, the encounter is treated as an unprecedented natural experiment. The next observational milestones include Euclid’s continued deep-field survey, the reanalysis of archival TESS light curves, and the Apophis flyby itself in 2029.