Astronomers spot smallest dark matter candidate ever
Astronomers just found a super faint object about a million times heavier than our Sun, possibly the smallest dark matter candidate ever seen.
It's sitting roughly 10 billion light-years from Earth, and scientists aren't sure yet if it's a clump of dark matter or a tiny galaxy.
How do you find something invisible?
A global team used a network of radio telescopes—including the Green Bank Telescope and the Very Long Baseline Array—to create a virtual Earth-sized telescope.
They spotted a tiny "pinch" in the light from a distant galaxy, caused by this object's gravity bending the light, which helped them detect something otherwise invisible.
A new frontier in cosmology
If this turns out to be dark matter, it's 100 times smaller than any similar object found before. That supports the idea that small, dense structures shaped by gravity exist in space.
Discoveries like this help scientists test theories about how galaxies form and how the universe evolves.
More searches are planned to see if these mysterious objects are common.