Scientists have detected a mysterious light glowing throughout the solar system
Scientists have discovered a very faint light that appears in the pictures, and its source is not yet known
Scientists have discovered, while studying images sent by the Hubble Space Telescope, that there is a mysterious light emanating from the heart of the solar system that does not come from the sun. The mysterious light was so dim that they performed several complex operations to study it and find out its source.
The deep darkness of space in our solar system may not be as dark as we thought.
Astronomers analyzed more than 200,000 images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements to try to locate a mysterious glow observed in the images.
Dubbed Skysurf , the project is based at ASU and includes researchers from the university and other research centers around the world.
The science team collected data from the images and then removed the glow from planets, stars, galaxies, and even the light between planetary nebulae, which is light that reflects off dust within our solar system, CNET reported.
After removing all these lights from the images, scientists discovered that there was still a little residual glow, or what was called "ghost light", which the researchers described as equivalent to the glow of 10 luminous fireflies only, and the scientific team said that the dim light may indicate that there are smaller stars. Older and less rich in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, and that these lights that appear today in the pictures may be 2.5 billion years old, according to Space.com.
Arizona State University researcher Tim Carlton explained in a statement: "We believe it is a local phenomenon not far from the solar system," and that "it may be a new component of the contents of the solar system that has been hypothesized mathematically but has not yet been quantified."
Scientists say that another popular explanation for this mysterious light is that the glow comes from a previously unaccounted field of dust and that it is caused by the reflection of light from countless small, bright comets that travel through the solar system in all directions.
"The brighter parts of the detected light are very faint, which makes it very difficult to detect even with the largest telescopes on Earth or in space," said Cristina Martinez-Lumbela, of the research team.
She added, "We have developed a custom image-processing procedure that allows us to analyze the faintest lights, and we have followed standard steps to study this faint light in astronomical images, which includes making two-dimensional models and removing all light except for the light coming from behind the solar system."
This finding has been documented in a few studies, two of which have been published in a journalAstronomical Journaland another in a magazineAstrophysical Journal Letters.
One study was led by Professor Roger Windhorst of Arizona State University, who noted that more than 95 percent of the photons of light that appear in Hubble images come from places less than 3 billion light-years from Earth.
"Since Hubble's early working days, most telescope users have ignored these sky photons, because they were so interested in the large, faint, discrete objects in Hubble images, like stars and galaxies," Windhorst said. Hubble has been able to measure faint brightness levels with great accuracy over its three decades of life."
Scientists believe that through these new analyzes of the images they may have identified an entirely new part of the ethereal formations that underlie our entire solar system.
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