Sorting Out Science offers the most recent Carnival of Space in a noir-ish style that recalls the detective pulps of years gone by, not to mention many a film noir itself (Out of the Past may be my favorite, but there were so many terrific movies in the genre). I always pick one blog entry with relevance for interstellar watchers, and this week it’s the work of Quasar9, with a look at Hubble images that cover one of the largest expanses of sky ever observed by the instrument. The distortion of galactic shapes revealing the presence of dark matter makes fascinating reading, said light being bent by the massive gravitational field involved in the dark matter distribution around the observed supercluster. Once again we’re in the realm of gravitational lensing, a phenomenon proving useful from the galactic cluster level to the hunt for distant exoplanets.