Hubble Detects Ghostly Glow Surrounding Our Solar System (phys.org) 17
Astronomers searched through 200,000 archival images from Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky. Like turning out the lights in a room, they subtracted the light from stars, galaxies, planets and the zodiacal light. Surprisingly, a ghostly, feeble glow was left over. It's equivalent to the steady light of ten fireflies spread across the entire sky. Phys.Org reports: One possible explanation is that a shell of dust envelops our solar system all the way out to Pluto, and is reflecting sunlight. Seeing airborne dust caught in sunbeams is no surprise when cleaning the house. But this must have a more exotic origin. Because the glow is so smoothy distributed, the likely source is innumerable cometsâ"free-flying dusty snowballs of ice. They fall in toward the sun from all different directions, spewing out an exhaust of dust as the ices sublimate due to heat from the sun. If real, this would be a newly discovered architectural element of the solar system. It has remained invisible until very imaginative and curious astronomers, and the power of Hubble, came along. The research papers are published in The Astronomical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Oh no! Space ghosts! (Score:3, Funny)
Who you're gonna call?
Not really surprising. (Score:2)
Since we see dust and clouds in many other star systems this isn't really a huge surprise.
Re: (Score:1)
Clearly you've reached a favorable agreement for him to live in your head, but the local HOA respectfully requests that you refrain from inviting your guest to barbecues and pool parties. Thank you.
It's a warning to other sentient species (Score:4, Insightful)
By analogy... (Score:1)
they subtracted the light from stars, galaxies, planets and the zodiacal light. Surprisingly, a ghostly, feeble glow was left over.
I dub it "dark light".
Famous Rock Guitarist and Interplanetary Dust (Score:5, Informative)
Brian May's scientific research was on this subject. From his Wikipedia page: "From 1970 to 1974, he studied for a PhD degree at Imperial College, studying reflected light from interplanetary dust"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
AT&T engineers Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias had found a constant 3K cosmic background radiation glow while calibrating their microwave transmission towers back in the 1960s. By my recollection of secondhand accounts, they spent months accounting for all possible contributors to the background "noise" and could only assume it was a constant cosmic background remnant of significant magnitude.
Now we've got a new contributor: refractive radiation from our own sun. It is quite likely we are living inside
Re: (Score:2)
That *would* be interesting.
I would think that any such local microwave glow would have to be fairly minor given the fact that the "Crisis in Cosmology" is still only a 10% gap in the expansion rate of the universe as calculated by simulating what it would have to be to get from the universe depicted in the CMBR to what we see today, versus the value based on measuring the red shift of "standard candle" Cepheid Variable stars and Type 1a Supernovas. The odds that they would "just happen" to almost agree by
May Cloud (Score:2)
Probably artifacts from starlink satellites (Score:1)
Not only have they royally fucked up ground observations they even managed to interfere with observations from space based telescopes including HST.
3.. 2.. 1.. (Score:1)
Comets? I doubt it. (Score:2)
Given the vastness of space, I highly doubt comets have been able to equally distribute a significant amount of dust, betting it's something that's always been that way, and will remain relatively constant.