Gravity’s lens: Finding a dim cluster

Relying solely on a gravitational mirage rather than visible images, astronomers have discovered a previously unknown cluster of galaxies and measured its distance from Earth.

Red spot at the lower right marks the location of the newly found galaxy cluster. Lucent Tech./NOAO/AURA/NSF

This first-time feat, which uses the properties of mass to infer the location of unseen objects, bodes well for searches of dark matter–the mysterious, invisible material that presumably makes up more than 95 percent of the mass of the universe.