Researchers using data from the Hubble Space Telescope have made a strange discovery: a “ghostly light” surrounds our solar system. When you factor in the light from stars, planets, and even the starlight glow scattered by dust, “extra” light is still being detected, and astronomers are trying to figure out where it’s coming from.
Researchers examined 200,000 Hubble images in a project called SKYSURF, looking for any excess light from known sources, and found a constant, faint glow that could indicate a previously unknown structure in our solar system. One suggestion is that there may be a dust ball surrounding the solar system, reflecting sunlight and causing the glow.
There is support for this idea from NASA’s New Horizons mission, which flew by Pluto in 2015 and is now heading into interstellar space. As it passed through the planets of the solar system and beyond, the mission detected a faint glow of background light, although this flare was not as strong as the recently discovered flare, Digitartlends reported.
“If our analysis is correct, then there is another element of dust between us and the distance that New Horizons has taken the measurements, which means that it is some sort of additional light coming from within our solar system.” , said one of the researchers, Tim Carlton. of Arizona State University, in a statement, “Because our measurement of afterglow is higher than New Horizons, we believe it is a local phenomenon not far from the solar system. It could be a new component of the solar system contents which postulated but not yet quantified.
The source of this hypothetical dust cloud is comets. These clumps of rock and ice streak across the solar system from all different directions. As they approach the sun, they heat up and emit dust and ice particles. This could explain the existence of the dust ball, which until now has remained hidden because it needed huge amounts of images from a highly sensitive instrument like Hubble to be observed.
