It is not known where the light comes from.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — Several articles published in The astronomical journal and The letters from the astrophysicist diary call there is more light on solar system than scientists know. The American Space Agency (NASA) isn’t sure why this happened.
Reported by SYF extensionOn Monday (12/19/2022), Project SKYSURF astronomers explored 200,000 archival images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists have made tens of thousands of observations to measure the light in the night sky.
Then they look at each light source who can see, such as the Sun, the planets, the moon, distant galaxies. Scientists then find out how much light each of these objects emits.
Then, one by one, like blowing out a candle, the researchers dimmed all the light to see what, if anything, was left. When everything is counted and the scales are balanced, astronomers find what little light is left. That’s roughly the same amount of light you’d get from 10 fireflies, scattered across the night sky. Looks like light pollution.
At this time, it is unclear where this residual light is coming from. However, astronomers have an idea. As a comet enters the inner solar system, following its orbit to closest approach to the Sun, bits of matter are ejected and eventually drift around the inner solar system.
Scientists suggest these tiny pieces may have accumulated over the lifetime of the solar system, producing a thin cloud of dust centered around the Sun. The cloud is made up of parts that are too small for us to see, but catch and reflect some ‘ of light, resulting in a faint glow.
If validated, these results will add another component to our understanding of star system formation and evolution. The findings would also explain most, but not all, of the residual light observed by astronomers.
Last year, astronomers used data from the New Horizons spacecraft to find a fainter but equally mysterious source of light. New Horizons has spent years exploring our distant solar system.
New Horizons visited Pluto in 2015 and a small Kuiper object in 2018. Along the way, it captured ambient light between 6 and 8 billion kilometers from the Sun.
At that distance, the proposed inner solar system’s dust cloud would not affect it. However, New Horizons has detected faint traces of light, apparently from a more distant source, which also remains unexplained.
Astronomers have proposed a number of explanations including dark matter reactions and unknown galaxies. However, dust can also be the cause of light.
