An international team has used the European VLBI Network (EVN) together with e-MERLIN, the Green Bank Telescope, (GBT) and the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), to detect a mysterious dark object in a distant galaxy. The discovery, made through the object’s gravitational lensing effect rather than direct light, reveals the lowest-mass object ever identified using this technique.
The observations were correlated in the Netherlands, and the results are published in Nature Astronomy and MNRAS Letters. The study highlights the power of coordinated global radio observations to probe unseen matter in the Universe.
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Image: Overlay of the infrared emission (black and white) with the radio emission (colour). The dark, low-mass object is located at the gap in the bright part of the arc on the right-hand side, but is not luminous at infrared or radio wavelengths. The zoom in shows the pinch in the luminous radio arc, where the extra mass from the dark object is gravitationally ‘imaged’ using the sophisticated modelling algorithms of the team. The dark object is indicated by the white blob at the pinch point of the arc, but no light from it has so far been detected at optical, infrared or radio wavelengths. Image credit: Keck/EVN/GBT/VLBA