Researchers using data from the Hubble Space Telescope have made a strange discovery: a “terrifying light” surrounding our solar system. When light from stars, planets, and even dust-scattered starlight is taken into account, some “extra” light is still detected and astronomers are trying to figure out where it comes from.
Researchers looked at 200,000 Hubble images in a project called SKYSURF, looking for excess light from known sources, and found a faint, persistent glow that might indicate previously unknown structure in our solar system. One suggestion is that there might be a ball of dust around the solar system that reflects sunlight and causes the glow.
This idea is supported by NASA’s New Horizons mission, which flew by Pluto in 2015 and is now heading into interstellar space. As it passed through the planets of the solar system and beyond, the mission detected a faint glow of background light, although this glow was not as strong as the one recently detected, Digitartlends reports.
“If our analysis is correct, then there is another element of dust between us and the distance measured by New Horizons, which means it is some kind of additional light coming from our solar system,” said Tim Carlton, one of the researchers. from Arizona State University, in a statement, “Because our residual light measure is larger than New Horizons, we believe it is a local phenomenon not far from the solar system. It may be a new component of the solar system content that has been postulated, but not yet quantified.
The source of this hypothetical cloud of dust is comets. These masses of rock and ice pass through the solar system from all different directions. As it approaches the Sun, it heats up and emits dust and ice particles. This may explain the existence of the dust ball, which has remained hidden until now because observing it requires large amounts of images from a highly sensitive instrument such as Hubble.