Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2026

12 ASTRO PUBLISHING tected an enigmatic dark object with a mass about one million times that of our Sun without observing any emitted light. This is the lowest mass dark object ever detected at a cosmological distance using only its gravitational influence, marking a major milestone in the quest to un- ravel the nature of dark matter. The discovery leverages a technique JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2026 A n international research team, using a worldwide network of radio telescopes, including the U.S. National Science Founda- tion National Radio Astronomy Ob- servatory (NSF NRAO) U.S. National Science Foundation Very Long Base- line Array (NSF VLBA) and U.S. Na- tional Science Foundation Green Bank Telescope (NSF GBT), has de- The lowest mass dark object in the distant Universe by NRAO T he dark matter object as seen by the team’s mas- sive telescope. [NSF/AUI/NSF NRAO/B. Saxton] known as very long baseline inter- ferometry (VLBI) to form a global, Earth-sized telescope that captures extremely sharp images of cosmic phenomena. The team observed a distant galaxy system, JVAS B1938 +666, where the light of a back- ground galaxy is gravitationally lensed by a foreground galaxy, pro- ducing beautiful arcs and multiple