To glimpse the earliest days of the cosmos, astronomers like UC Davis Associate Professor Tucker Jones rely not only on the magnification of telescopes, but also on powerful natural magnification from our cosmic neighbors in the form of gravitational lenses. For Jones, identifying these gravitational lenses is a first step to understanding the origin of the cosmos.
An unseen "mirror world" of particles that interact with our world only via gravity might be the key to solving a major puzzle in cosmology today — the Hubble constant problem.