This artists illustration reveals the area and size of a hypothetical cloud of dust surrounding our planetary system. Credit: NASA, ESA, Andi James (STScI).
Exhaust from Infalling Comets Makes Space a Dusty Place.
Envision walking into a space in the evening, turning off all the lights, and closing the shades. Yet a spooky glow originates from the walls, ceiling, and floor. The faint light is barely adequate to see your hands prior to your face, but it persists.
Seems like a scene out of “Ghost Hunters?” No, for astronomers this is the real deal. Nevertheless, trying to find something thats close to nothing is challenging. Astronomers searched through 200,000 archival images from Hubble Space Telescope and made 10s of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky. Like ending up the lights in a room, they subtracted the light from stars, galaxies, worlds, and even the zodiacal light. (Zodiacal light is a faint glow of scattered sunshine scattered by interplanetary dust.) Remarkably, a ghostly, weak glow was left over. Its comparable to the stable light of ten fireflies spread out throughout the whole sky.
Wheres that originating from?
One possible explanation is that a shell of dust covers our solar system all the way out to Pluto, and is reflecting sunshine. They fall in toward the Sun from all various directions, spewing out an exhaust of dust as the ices sublimate due to heat from the Sun. If genuine, this would be a freshly discovered architectural element of the solar system.
This artists illustration shows the place and size of a theoretical cloud of dust surrounding our planetary system. Astronomers searched through 200,000 images and made tens of countless measurements from Hubble Space Telescope to find a recurring background radiance in the sky. The likely source is countless comets– free-flying dusty snowballs of ice since the radiance is so efficiently distributed. They fall in towards the Sun from all different directions, gushing out an exhaust of dust as the ices sublimate due to heat from the Sun. If genuine, this would be a recently found architectural element of the solar system. Credit: NASA, ESA, Andi James (STScI).
Hubble Space Telescope Detects Ghostly Glow Surrounding Our Solar System.
Aside from a tapestry of flashing stars, and the radiance of the waxing and subsiding Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to the casual observer. However how dark is dark?
To discover, astronomers chose to arrange through 200,000 images from NASAs Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of countless measurements on these images to search for any recurring background glow in the sky, in an ambitious task called SKYSURF. This would be any leftover light after subtracting the glow from worlds, stars, galaxies, and from dust in the aircraft of our solar system (called zodiacal light).
When scientists finished this stock, they discovered an exceptionally small excess of light, equivalent to the consistent radiance of 10 fireflies spread out throughout the entire sky. Thats like turning out all the lights in a shuttered room and still finding an eerie radiance coming from the walls, ceiling, and floor.
This picture shows the zodiacal light as it appeared on March 1, 2021, in Skull Valley, Utah. The Pleiades star cluster is noticeable near the top of the light column.
The scientists say that a person possible description for this recurring glow is that our inner planetary system consists of a tenuous sphere of dust from comets that are falling under the planetary system from all directions, which the glow is sunshine reflecting off this dust. If real, this dust shell could be a brand-new addition to the recognized architecture of the solar system.
This concept is reinforced by the fact that in 2021 another team of astronomers utilized data from NASAs New Horizons spacecraft to also measure the sky background. New Horizons zipped Pluto in 2015, and a small Kuiper belt things in 2018, and is now heading into interstellar space. The New Horizons measurements were done at a distance of 4 billion to 5 billion miles from the Sun. This is well outside the world of the asteroids and planets where there is no contamination from interplanetary dust.
New Horizons found something a bit fainter that is apparently from a more far-off source than Hubble found. The source of the background light seen by New Horizons also stays unexplained. There are various theories ranging from the decay of dark matter to a huge hidden population of remote galaxies.
” If our analysis is appropriate theres another dust element in between us and the range where New Horizons made measurements. That indicates this is some type of extra light originating from inside our planetary system,” stated Tim Carleton, of Arizona State University (ASU).
” Because our measurement of residual light is greater than New Horizons we think it is a regional phenomenon that is not from far outside the planetary system. It might be a new aspect to the contents of the planetary system that has actually been assumed however not quantitatively determined up until now,” stated Carleton.
“More than 95% of the photons in the images from Hubbles archive come from distances less than 3 billion miles from Earth. Considering that Hubbles really early days, most Hubble users have actually disposed of these sky-photons, as they are interested in the faint discrete objects in Hubbles images such as stars and galaxies,” stated Windhorst.
A number of graduate and undergraduate students contributed to predict SKYSURF, including Rosalia OBrien, Delondrae Carter and Darby Kramer at ASU, Scott Tompkins at the University of Western Australia, Sarah Caddy at Macquarie University in Australia, and many others.
The groups research study documents are published in The Astronomical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Referrals:.
” SKYSURF: Constraints on Zodiacal Light and Extragalactic Background Light through Panchromatic HST All-sky Surface-brightness Measurements: II. Limits on Diffuse Light at 1.25, 1.4, and 1.6 µm” by Timothy Carleton, Rogier A. Windhorst, Rosalia OBrien, Seth H. Cohen, Delondrae Carter, Rolf Jansen, Scott Tompkins, Richard G. Arendt, Sarah Caddy, Norman Grogin, Scott J. Kenyon, Anton Koekemoer, John MacKenty, Stefano Casertano, Luke J. M. Davies, Simon P. Driver, Eli Dwek, Alexander Kashlinsky, Nathan Miles, Nor Pirzkal, Aaron Robotham, Russell Ryan, Haley Abate, Hanga Andras-Letanovszky, Jessica Berkheimer, Zak Goisman, Daniel Henningsen, Darby Kramer, Ci mone Rogers and Andi Swirbul, 4 October 2022, The Astronomical Journal.DOI: 10.3847/ 1538-3881/ ac8d02.
” SKYSURF: Constraints on Zodiacal Light and Extragalactic Background Light through Panchromatic HST All-sky Surface-brightness Measurements. I. Survey Overview and Methods” by Rogier A. Windhorst, Timothy Carleton, Rosalia OBrien, Seth H. Cohen, Delondrae Carter, Rolf Jansen, Scott Tompkins, Richard G. Arendt, Sarah Caddy, Norman Grogin, Anton Koekemoer, John MacKenty, Stefano Casertano, Luke J. M. Davies, Simon P. Driver, Eli Dwek, Alexander Kashlinsky, Scott J. Kenyon, Nathan Miles, Nor Pirzkal, Aaron Robotham, Russell Ryan, Haley Abate, Hanga Andras-Letanovszky, Jessica Berkheimer, John Chambers, Connor Gelb, Zak Goisman, Daniel Henningsen, Isabela Huckabee, Darby Kramer, Teerthal Patel, Rushabh Pawnikar, Ewan Pringle, Ci mone Rogers, Steven Sherman, Andi Swirbul and Kaitlin Webber, 15 September 2022, The Astronomical Journal.DOI: 10.3847/ 1538-3881/ ac82af.
” SKYSURF-3: Testing Crowded Object Catalogs in the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field Mosaics to Study Sample Incompleteness from an Extragalactic Background Light Perspective” by Darby M. Kramer, Timothy Carleton, Seth. H. Cohen, Rolf Jansen, Rogier A. Windhorst, Norman Grogin, Anton Koekemoer, John W. MacKenty and Nor Pirzkal, 18 November 2022, The Astronomical Journal Letters.DOI: 10.3847/ 2041-8213/ ac9cca.
” SKYSURF-4: Panchromatic Full Sky Surface Brightness Measurement Methods and Results” by Rosalia OBrien, Timothy Carleton, Rogier A. Windhorst, Rolf A. Jansen, Delondrae Carter, Scott Tompkins, Sarah Caddy, Seth H. Cohen, Haley Abate, Richard G. Arendt, Jessica Berkheimer, Annalisa Calamida, Stefano Casertano, Simon P. Driver, Connor Gelb, Zak Goisman, Norman Grogin, Daniel Henningsen, Isabela Huckabee, Scott J. Kenyon, Anton M. Koekemoer, Darby Kramer, John Mackenty, Aaron Robotham and Steven Sherman, 13 October 2022, Astrophysics > > Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.arXiv:2210.08010.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of global cooperation in between NASA and ESA. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, performs Hubble and Webb science operations.
The faint light is barely enough to see your hands prior to your face, but it continues.
Like turning out the lights in a room, they deducted the light from stars, galaxies, worlds, and even the zodiacal light. Its equivalent to the steady light of 10 fireflies spread out throughout the whole sky.
The Pleiades star cluster is visible near the top of the light column. The source of the background light seen by New Horizons also stays unusual.
