When researchers completed this inventory, they found an exceedingly tiny excess of light, equivalent to the steady glow of 10 fireflies spread across the entire sky. This would be any leftover light after subtracting the glow from planets, stars, galaxies, and from dust in the plane of our solar system (called zodiacal light).
To find out, astronomers decided to sort through 200,000 images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and made tens of thousands of measurements on these images to look for any residual background glow in the sky, in an ambitious project called SKYSURF. It has remained invisible until very imaginative and curious astronomers, and the power of Hubble, came along.Īside from a tapestry of glittering stars, and the glow of the waxing and waning Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to the casual observer. If real, this would be a newly discovered architectural element of the solar system. 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. Because the glow is so smoothy distributed, the likely source is innumerable comets - free-flying dusty snowballs of ice. Seeing airborne dust caught in sunbeams is no surprise when cleaning the house. One possible explanation is that a shell of dust envelops our solar system all the way out to Pluto, and is reflecting sunlight.
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