Astronomers have discovered an invisible object with a mass of about one million Suns that doesn’t fit any known cosmic structure. Using gravitational lensing and data from radio telescopes around the world, including the Green Bank Telescope (GBT), the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), and the European VLBI Network (EVN)—the team revealed a compact core (likely a black hole or dense stellar nucleus) surrounded by a dark, extended disk.
All observations were correlated at the Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC (JIVE) in the Netherlands, effectively forming an Earth-sized radio telescope that captured the object’s subtle gravitational distortions in unprecedented detail.
The discovery challenges current dark matter models and could represent a new class of dark cosmic structure. This is the third object of its kind, but the first studied in such detail.
Read the full JIVE Press release here.
Paper link Vegetti et al., Additional Paper links: Powell et al., McKean et al.
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