Overview

• Two peer-reviewed papers published on October 9 in Nature Astronomy and MNRAS detail the detection and analysis.
• The unseen object has a mass of about one million Suns and sits roughly 10 billion light-years from Earth.
• It emits no light, with its presence revealed by a subtle distortion in a larger gravitational lens.
• Researchers combined data from the GBT, VLBA, and EVN to create an Earth-sized very long baseline interferometer for the measurement.
• The object's nature is unresolved—either a dark-matter halo or an ultra-compact inactive dwarf galaxy—and teams are conducting follow-up analyses and broader searches consistent with cold dark matter expectations.