Astronomers have found a mysterious “ghost glow” circling our solar system and are still not sure where it’s coming from.
Scientists say the faint glow persists even when other sources of light, such as stars and planets, are subtracted.
Scientists made this discovery when astronomers set out to see what dark space might be like, which they did by examining 200,000 images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, removing the expected light sources (stars and planets), and looking for any glare. in the sky. background. They found a slight excess of prevailing light.
Scientists have discovered that the amount of light is as small as 10 fireflies (luminous beetles) scattered across the sky around our solar system. But scientists are still baffled by the glow and have yet to know its exact source.
The glow could be caused by an unknown structure within our solar system, scientists speculate. It can include a ball of dust formed by comets falling into the solar system, which reflects sunlight.
However, this dust envelope remains hypothetical and, if real, would change our understanding of the structure of the solar system.
In 2021, the New Horizons spacecraft also detected a small amount of background light in the solar system. This light also remains unexplained, and possible explanations suggested have included a hidden cluster of distant galaxies in decaying dark matter.
However, the light detected by New Horizons was less intense than that in the Hubble images. This could be because New Horizons was far away, about 4 or 5 billion miles from the sun.
This leads scientists to believe that the light comes from within our nearby solar system.
Taken together, the two results indicate that the solar system may contain some elements that have not been measured before.
The findings are reported in new articles published in The Astronomical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
