The gravitational lensing not only splits the light source, but magnifies it, allowing a detailed view of the light source behind the lens. Thanks to this, the team says that HerS-3 appears to be a bright starburst galaxy—a galaxy undergoing explosive star formation—and was formed at a time when star formation was at its peak throughout the universe. HerS-3 also has a tilted, rotating disk, from the center of which gas is gushing out at a furious rate, the team say.

“Thanks to this natural telescope, we can zoom into regions 10 times smaller than the Milky Way, almost 12 billion light-years away, and in the process infer hidden matter in the light-of-sight,” said Hugo Mesias, a coauthor of the paper, in a statement.

A Giant Dark Matter Halo Revealed...