A new analysis of data from Hubble confirms this: there is too much light in the space around the Solar System. And no one has any idea what it could be.

It’s not much lighter, specialists say, just a subtle, ghostly glowa slight excess that cannot be explained in a census of all objects that emit light.

Not all the stars and galaxies that surround the Solar System, not even the zodiacal light, none of them can explain what astronomers now call it “ghost light”.

After analyzing 200,000 Hubble images and taking thousands of measurements in a project called “SKYSURF”, an international collaboration she is sure that the excess light is real.

And those same experts they can’t explain it. Or at least not yet.

But they speculate about it and talk about the theory that has had the most consensus a dusty component of the Solar System that we haven’t yet detected directly: tiny particles of dust and ice from a population of comets traveling inward from dark tracts, reflecting sunlight and generating a diffuse global glow.

This source would be a little closer to us thanand the extra light detected by the New Horizons space probe, who found an excess of optical light in space beyond Pluto, outside the Solar System.

“If our analysis is correct, there is another component of dust between us and the distance where New Horizons made the measurements. This means that it is about a kind of extra light that comes from within our solar system,” said astronomer Tim Carleton of Arizona State University.

“Since our afterlight measurement is higher than that of New Horizons, we think it is a local phenomenon not too far from the Solar System. It could be a new element of Solar System content.”

There are many things that shine, with their own light or not, floating in the Universe: planets, stars, galaxies, even gas and dust. And in general, shiny things are the things we want to see. Therefore, detecting ambient light in interstitial locations (interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic space) is somewhat complicated.

However, when we look, we sometimes find that things are not as we expected them to be.

For example, something we cannot explain in the galactic center is the production of high-energy light. Lto Voyager I found a hydrogen-associated excess of luminosity at the edge of the Solar System. And there is also the detection of New Horizons. Things look eerily bright out there.

The aim of SKYSURF was to fully characterize the brightness of the sky. “More than 95 percent of photons in Hubble archive images they come from distances of less than 5 billion kilometers Earth,” says astronomer and Hubble veteran Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University.

“Since the early days of Hubble, most of those photons from the sky are being discarded, as scientists do interested in other items like stars and galaxies,” adds Windhorst.

“But these photons from the sky contain important information that can be gleaned thanks to Hubble’s unique ability to measure faint levels of brightness with high precision over its three decades of life.”

In three separate papers, the researchers scoured the Hubble archive for signs of faint galaxies that we may have lost and quantified the light that they should emit objects known to glow.

The team in search of hidden galaxies has established this not enough galaxies have been lost to account for the additional light.

The resulting excess was, according to the scientists, equivalent to a constant glow emitted by 10 fireflies in the sky.

That may not sound like much, but it’s enough to know we are missing something. And it’s important. Increasingly, scientists are finding ways to see the light between the stars. If there is a local excess, we need to know about it, as it may distort our understanding of more distant ghostly glows.

And of course there’s the impact that could have on our understanding of the Solar System and how it forms. “When we look at the night sky, we can learn a lot about Earth’s atmosphere. Hubble is in space,” says astronomer Rosalia O’Brien of Arizona State University.

“When we look at that night sky, we can learn a lot about what’s happening within our galaxy, our Solar System and, on a large scale, the entire Universe.”

The three SKYSURF articles have been published in The astronomical journal Y The letters from the astrophysicist diary. There is a fourth paper, submitted to The Astronomical Journal but not yet published.

Source: Scientific Advisory