Researchers puzzle over mysterious "ghost light" in space

Created: 12/16/2022, 12:49 p.m

By: Tanya Banner

After subtracting all known light sources, there is still some light left in space.

Where does this "ghost light" come from?

Researchers have an idea.

Tempe - Our solar system is surrounded by a faint glow, a phenomenon researchers call "ghost light."

It was discovered with the help of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Researchers from Arizona State University in Tempe actually wanted to find out how dark the universe would be without the various existing light sources.

To do this, the research team led by Tim Carleton used 200,000 "Hubble" images of the universe and made tens of thousands of measurements, according to a statement from the US space agency Nasa.

The researchers looked for a residual glow in the background sky by subtracting the light from planets, stars, galaxies and all other known light sources from the background.

hna.de reports on this.

Researchers discover mysterious "ghost light" in space

But in the end there was still some light left.

The amount of light is comparable to "the regular glow of ten fireflies distributed across the sky," according to a NASA release.

"It's like turning off all the lights in a locked room and still noticing an eerie glow on the walls, ceiling, and floor," NASA said.

The "ghost light" does not come from known celestial objects and cannot be explained at this time.

However, the SKYSURF project's research team has a theory: Sunlight could be reflected off comet-borne dust particles.

Data from NASA's "New Horizons" space probe support this theory: in 2021, the space probe, which had flown past the dwarf planet Pluto years earlier, also measured the sky background.

The spacecraft was four to five billion kilometers away from the sun.

Look into the depths of the universe - This is how "Hubble" sees the universe

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"Ghost Light" is said to come from within the solar system

New Horizons also detected a faint glow, but it was even fainter than what Hubble had observed.

Again, the source of the light has not yet been clarified, but there are numerous theories ranging from black matter to invisible galaxies.

"If our analysis is correct, there is a dust component between us and the distance New Horizons took measurements from," explains Carleton.

"This means that it is a kind of additional light that comes from inside our solar system." The researchers suspect that this is a local phenomenon, since the residual light does not come from far outside the solar system.

"It could be a new element in the solar system that has been suspected but not measured," says Carleton.

There is more light in space than researchers can explain.

(Iconic image) © imago images/Cavan Images

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'Hubble' Space Telescope Helped Discover 'Ghost Light'

"More than 95 percent of the photons in the images from the 'Hubble' archive come from a distance of less than three billion kilometers from Earth," reports astronomer Rogier Windhorst.

Since the early days of Hubble, most astronomers would have ignored the images, only interested in the distant stars and galaxies.

"But these images contain important information that can be extracted thanks to Hubble's unique ability to measure faint levels of brightness with high precision," Windhorst continues.

The research team's study results were published in the scientific journals

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