Astronomers have discovered the most distant radio signal ever Its source is a radio loud quasar blasting out jets when the universe was still in its infancy. With assistance from the ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have discovered the most distant radio emission ever recorded. The source is a quasar so distant that its light has been travelling 13 billion years to reach us. That means that it existed when the Universe was just 780 or so million years old. This artist’s impression shows how the distant quasar P172+18 and its radio jets may have looked. To date (early 2021), this is the most distant quasar with radio jets ever found and it was studied with the help of ESO’s Very Large Telescope. It is so distant that light from it has travelled for about 13 billion years to reach us: we see it as it was when the Universe was only about 780 million years old. (ESO)