By: Science DeskNew Delhi | October 14, 2025 05:27 PM IST 3 min readThe Einstein ring in infrared light, portrayed here in black and white, with the radio emission of the compact symmetric object overlaid on it in color. (Image credit: Keck/EVN/GBT/VLBA)Scientists have discovered a small clump of “dark matter.” Located approximately 10 billion light-years away from Earth at the edge of the universe, the object has a mass a million times greater than that of our sun.Previously presumed to be invisible, dark matter does not emit light and occupies about 27 per cent of the universe. However, researchers from the University of York say that dark matter does leave a faint yet measurable impact on light passing through the area where the object exists.To detect this mysterious object, scientists used what is called gravitational lensing, a phenomenon where light of a remote object is distorted and deflected by its gravity. As it turns out, astronomers stumbled on the small clump of dark matter while observing an Einstein ring, a rare gravitational lensing phenomenon where the light from a faraway galaxy is bent into a ring shape by the gravity of an object.“Hunting for dark objects that do not seem to emit any light is clearly challenging. Since we can’t see them directly, we instead use very distant galaxies as a backlight to look for their gravitational imprints,” said Devon Powell, lead author of the study at the Max Planck Institute of Astrophysics in Garching, Germany. (Image credit: Keck/EVN/GBT/VLBA)To detect the clump of dark matter, scientists combined the power of radio telescopes, including the European Very Long Baseline Interferometric Network of radio telescopes spread across Europe, Asia, South Africa and Puerto Rico, the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia and the Very Long Baseline Array in Hawaii. This effectively created an Earth-sized telescope.They then combined the data from these instruments and used computational algorithms powered by supercomputers to see the object’s gravitational lensing effects.According to John McKean from the University of Groningen, Netherlands, “from the first high-resolution image, we immediately observed a narrowing in the gravitational arc, which is the tell-tale sign that we were onto something. Only another small clump of mass between us and the distant radio galaxy could cause this.”Story continues below this adThe discovery of these clumps of dark matter is one of the keys to understanding the universe, as the substance is even older than the Big Bang, the defining event that marked the beginning of the universe.© IE Online Media Services Pvt LtdTags:Dark Matterspace