Brandon Zhao

Images of distant galaxies are riddled with curved arcs and smears — light warped on its way to us. This effect, predicted by Albert Einstein, acts like a giant funhouse mirror: a massive galaxy cluster distorts the images of background sources.

Through the ripples on the water, pebbles at the bottom of a pool look shifted and warped. In a similar way, the gravity of invisible dark matter bends the light of distant galaxies — a phenomenon known as weak lensing.

In April 2021, the antennas of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)—a global network of millimeter-wave radio telescopes — zeroed in on a tiny spot in the constellation Virgo.