Astronomers have discovered a surprisingly small “dark object” lurking within a distant ring of warped light. The record-breaking find could help shed light on the mysterious identity of dark matter, which would have major implications for the field of cosmology.

The hidden object, likely a clump of invisible dark matter, was spotted within B1938+666 — an “Einstein ring” located around 10 billion light-years from Earth. This luminous halo (which appears dark in the black-and-white images) is made up of light from a distant galaxy that has been bent around a closer foreground galaxy (the dark dot at the center of the ring). This is an effect of gravitational lensing, a phenomenon that was first proposed by Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity in 1915.