Hubble detects a ghostly glow around the solar system

outer space

Technology Innovation Website Editor – 11/12/2022

This illustration shows the location and size of a possible dust cloud in our solar system.
[Imagem: NASA/ESA/Andi James (STScI)]

Dust glow

Behind the tapestry of stars and the glow of the moon, the night sky appears pitch black to the casual observer.

But is it really completely dark?

To find out, astronomers decided to analyze 200,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope and take tens of thousands of measurements on those images to look for any remaining background glow in the sky, in an ambitious project called Sky-Surf.

The interest is to determine what light is left after subtracting the brightness of planets, stars, galaxies and dust in the plane of our solar system, which is called zodiacal light.

When the team completed this inventory, there was already some light left, of a minuscule intensity, equivalent to the continuous glow of 10 fireflies dotted across the sky. It’s like turning off all the lights in a closed room and still finding strange glows coming from the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Astronomers suggest that the most likely explanation for this afterglow is that our inner solar system contains a faint ball of dust, possibly released by comets, that falls into the solar system from all directions, and that the glow is sunlight reflected from this dust. .

If this shell of dust is real, it could be a new addition to the structure of the solar system. While it appears to be a well-known site, our system has indeed presented a plethora of surprises to astronomers over the past few years, including magnetic tunnels🇧🇷 Highways that allow super fast travela background alignmentOne The population of asteroids of interstellar origin🇧🇷 fossil meteorites and much more.

other stars in the solar system

The dust shell idea has a precedent. space probe data new Horizonswhich passed Pluto in 2015 and one by a small object in the Kuiper belt in 2018, and is now heading into interstellar space, revealed A mysterious glow in the outer regions of the solar system🇧🇷

The signal was measured by new Horizons Even fainter and from a source farther away than what Hubble has detected. Their measurements were taken at a distance of 7.5 billion to 8 billion kilometers from the sun, which is outside the realm of planets and asteroids, but also where there is no interplanetary dust pollution.

The backlight source he sees new Horizons They also remain unexplained, although there are many theories, ranging from the decay of dark matter to an unseen, huge number of distant galaxies.

“If our analysis is correct, then there is another element of dust between us and the distance where new Horizons do measurements. This means some kind of extra light coming from within our solar system, said Tim Carleton of Arizona State University. “Since our residual light measure is greater than new Horizons, we think it is a local phenomenon not very far from the solar system. It could be a new solar system contents component that has been hypothesized but not yet quantified.”

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