A new analysis of Hubble data has established: there is a lot of light in the space around the solar system.
Not much extra light, for sure. Just a subtle ghostly glow, a faint excess that couldn’t be accounted for in a census of all light-emitting beings.
All the stars and galaxies that surround the solar system — and the zodiacal light, also known as solar system dust — none of them can explain what astronomers now call “ghost light.”
After analyzing 200,000 Hubble images and taking thousands of measurements in a project called skysurfinternational collaboration confirms excess light is real.
Also, they can’t fully explain it. There are possibilities, but none have been confirmed. Not now anyway.
The strongest possibility? A dusty element in the solar system that we haven’t directly detected yet: Tiny particles of dust and ice from a group of comets travel inward from the dark parts of the solar system, reflecting sunlight and generating a diffuse global glow.
This source will be a little closer to us than Extra light detected by the New Horizons space probewhich found excess light in space beyond Pluto, outside the solar system.
“If our analysis is correct, then there is another dust element between us and the distance measured by New Horizons. And that means this is some kind of additional light that comes from our solar system,” she said. says astronomer Tim Carlton from Arizona State University.
“Because our afterlight measurement is higher than that of New Horizons, we believe it is a local phenomenon not far from the solar system. They could be new content of the solar system hypothesized but not yet measured quantitatively.”
There are many bright things floating around in the universe: planets, stars, galaxies, and even gas and dust. And in general, bright things are the things we want to look at. So detecting ambient light in interstitial spaces – the space between planets, interstellar and between galaxies – is a challenge.
However, when we look, we sometimes find that things are not as we expect them to be.
For example, something we can’t explain is being produced at the center of the galaxy High power light. Voyager found an increase in brightness associated with hydrogen on the edge of the solar system. Discover new horizons. Things look eerily bright there.
The aim of SKYSURF was to fully characterize the brightness of the sky.
“More than 95 percent of the photons in the Hubble archive images come from distances less than 3 billion miles from Earth. Since the earliest days of Hubble, most Hubble users have ignored these sky photons, because they are interested in the faint discrete objects in Hubble images, such as stars and galaxies. says veteran Hubble astronomer and expert Roger Windhorst from Arizona State University.
“But these sky photons contain important information that can be gleaned from Hubble’s unique ability to measure faint brightness levels with high precision over its three decades of life.”
Through three separate papers, the researchers searched the Hubble archives for signs of faint galaxies we may have missed and determined what light must be emitted by objects known to shine.
The team searching for hidden galaxies determined that not enough galaxies had been lost to explain the extra light.
The resulting excess, the scientists said, is equivalent to a constant glow of 10 fireflies across the sky.
That may not sound like much, but it’s enough to know that we’re missing out. This is important. Increasingly, scientists are finding ways to see the light between the stars. If there is a local excess, we need to know about it, because it could distort our understanding of distant ghostglows.
And, of course, there could be an impact on our understanding of the solar system and how it’s made up.
“When we look at the night sky, we can learn a lot about the Earth’s atmosphere. Hubble is in space”, says astronomer Rosalia O’Brien from Arizona State University.
“When we look at that night sky, we can learn a lot about what’s happening within our galaxy and solar system and on a large scale like the entire universe.”
The three Skysurf articles published in The astronomical journal And Letters from the astrophysicist diaryand can be found down hereAnd down hereAnd down here. A fourth document was presented to The astronomical journal Which has not yet been published, can be found On the arXiv prepress server.
