Since the first detection of colliding black holes in 2015, gravitational-wave astronomy has quietly accumulated a handful of events that seem to defy the known rules of stellar physics — mergers too massive to have formed through any ordinary cosmic pathway. Now, researchers propose that spacetime itself may be the source of the confusion: gravitational lensing, the same warping of geometry that bends light around galaxy clusters, may have amplified certain signals, making ordinary collisions appear impossible. The universe, it seems, is not always showing us what is there — sometimes it is s