Astronomers detect million-solar-mass object in distant universe - The Brighter Side of News
A team of international astronomers has detected an extraordinarily faint, million-solar-mass object in the distant universe — the smallest dark structure ever observed at such vast reach. Though it emits no light, its presence was revealed through gravitational lensing: it subtly warped the image of a background galaxy behind it. By linking radio telescopes worldwide through Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), researchers achieved the precision needed to spot this tiny distortion. Their modelling confirms a dense object with a mass around 1.13 million Suns, located within a galaxy-lens system known as JVAS B1938+666. The find challenges previous limits on how small dark matter clumps can be and offers new direct insight into the behavior of dark matter at fine scales. Whether it’s a pure dark matter clump, an ultra-compact dwarf, or something else, this discovery opens fresh pathways to test cosmological models and understand the invisible scaffolding of the universe.
The Key points
- The object has a mass of about one million times that of the Sun.
- It is the lowest-mass dark structure ever detected at such a distance.
- It produces no light or radiation—detected purely via gravitational effects.
- Its presence was inferred through a tiny “pinch” in a lensed galaxy image.
- The lensing system used is called JVAS B1938+666.
- Observations made using global VLBI linked multiple radio telescopes.
- Two independent analytic techniques (gravitational imaging and parametric modeling) confirm its existence.
- The detection reached a 26-sigma confidence level—very robust.
- It may be a dark matter subhalo or an ultra-compact relic object.
- This discovery places new constraints on models of dark matter and galaxy formation.
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