Cosmic Lenses Shed Strange New Light On The Universe's Mysteries?

When we observe the sky at night, we peer up at a sea of incredible blackness, swimming with a myriad of dazzling dabs of distant starlight. Much more is unknown about the Universe than is known--and, it has been said, the Universe is not only weirder than we imagine, it is weirder than we can imagine. What we think we know is this: the Universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago in the faster-than-the-speed-of-light exponential inflation of Space and Time at the instant of the Big Bang--ballooning wildly from the size of an elementary particle to attain macroscopic size in the merest fraction of a second. The Universe keeps its secrets well, and to understand this incomprehensibly immense and strange swath of Spacetime, of which we are a part, we seek to find the elusive answer to the most profound and important of all mysteries--the mystery of the origins of all that we are and all that we will ever know. In January 2017, an international team of astronomers, announced that, by using distant galaxies as gravitational lenses, they had made new measurements supporting the finding that the Universe is currently expanding faster than expected.