Comets are unpleasant things. They spread little bits of dust as they travel through the solar system. We get to see a meteor shower if Earth takes place to experience one of those cometary dust routes.
This photo, made by NASAs Spitzer Space Telescope in infrared light, reveals Comet Enckes glowing nucleus/nuclear region and a trail of warm dust shed by the comet along its orbital path. Comets like this contribute a lot of dust to the planetary system. Credit: NASA
Astronomer and Hubble veteran Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University understood to go searching for the “ghost light” from comet dust in archival HST images. He led a team of graduate and undergraduate students in a project called SKYSURF to trace the ghost light.
Over the years, Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images have actually captured “remaining light” that could not be traced back to radiances from planets, stars, galaxies, or dust in the actual aircraft of our planetary system. Could that dim radiance come from a shell of comet dust? Thats what a team of astronomers would like to know.
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” More than 95% of the photons in the images from Hubbles archive originated from ranges less than 3 billion miles from Earth. Since Hubbles very early days, a lot of Hubble users have actually discarded these sky-photons, as they are interested in the faint discrete items in Hubbles images such as galaxies and stars,” said Windhorst. “But these sky-photons contain crucial info which can be drawn out thanks to Hubbles unique capability to measure faint brightness levels to high precision over its 3 decades of life time.”
Project SKYSURF: HST as Photometer
After 32 years of observations, HST has actually offered incredible views of the universe. The group created a set of analysis and reprocessing practices in order to sort out the extremely faint light shown from comet dust. The idea was to tease out the ghostly light from a possible comet shell from other background sources.
To do that, they considered other background sources of light and were able to “subtract out” the general surface area brightness (SB) of the sky. To do that, the group compared HST sky-SB measurements with predictions describing zodiacal light and galactic foregrounds. (The zodiacal light is a well-known glow of diffuse sunshine. It spreads off interplanetary dust in the plane of the solar system. You can see it by naked eye in addition to through ground-based telescopes on very dark nights.) By contrast, the scattered radiance that Windhorst and his coworkers discovered in HST information is not limited to the planetary systems airplane. Their analysis is letting them understand this scattered light part in the HST information and lets them put some limitations on its origin (either from inside the solar system or at cosmological distances).
Ghostly Emanations of Solar System Light?
As soon as you take into account all the other stuff up there that gives off or shows light, theres still the ghostly glow that motivated Windhorst and his group to find an explanation. They arranged through 200,000 HST images and omitted all the apparent sources. What they were left with was an extremely small light excess.
The researchers state that a person possible description for this recurring glow is a tenuous sphere of dust thats reflecting sunlight. They believe the dust comes from comets that are falling into the planetary system from all directions. It will join the stock of the solar system architecture if they validate that this dust shell is genuine.
At this point, theres no hard confirmation that a comet-dust-created dust shell is the origin of the light. To get a full idea of the degree of this light and its source, the teams continue to survey the whole HST archive.
To learn more
Hubble Detects Ghostly Glow Surrounding Our Solar Systemhttps:// hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2022/news-2022-050.
SKYSURF: Constraints on Zodiacal Light and Extragalactic Background Light through Panchromatic HST All-sky Surface-brightness Measurements. I. Survey Overview and Methods.
SKYSURF: Constraints on Zodiacal Light and Extragalactic Background Light throughPanchromatic HST All-sky Surface-brightness Measurements: II. Limits on DiffuseLight at 1.25, 1.4, and 1.6 µm (links to PDF).
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Over the years, Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images have recorded “leftover light” that couldnt be traced back to radiances from planets, stars, galaxies, or dust in the actual plane of our solar system. The team created a set of analysis and reprocessing practices in order to sift out the very faint light shown from comet dust. Their analysis is letting them comprehend this diffuse light element in the HST data and lets them put some limitations on its origin (either from inside the solar system or at cosmological distances).
At this point, theres no hard confirmation that a comet-dust-created dust shell is the origin of the light. To get a complete idea of the degree of this light and its source, the teams continue to survey the whole HST archive.
