A detailed analysis of more than 200 thousand archival images from the Hubble telescope showed that in the belt of planets of our system there is a background glow of unknown origin. The region of “ghostly glow” extends up to 5 billion km from the Sun. It’s like turning off the light in the room, and the walls, floor and ceiling would continue to glow. Scientists do not yet have a rigorous explanation for this phenomenon. One of them is the “dusty” comets.
Image Source: NASA, ESA, Andi James (STScI)
The incredible sensitivity of the Hubble Space Observatory to the visible spectrum makes it possible to capture very faint photons. Until now, astronomers have filtered out any background sources of photons in an effort to gather more information about the observed objects. But some of them wondered: what if stars, comets, planets and other scattered light from small and large asteroids in the solar system were thrown out of the Hubble images? Thus, the SKYSURF program was born to evaluate the background glow in our system.
The analysis helped make the discovery that up to a sphere with a radius of about 4.8 billion km, the sky itself glows uniformly with an intensity that is approximately equal to the intensity of the glow of ten fireflies in total. Thus, in the solar system there is a certain structure that radiates, but rather scatters light from the sun. And we are talking about the structure, since this object or cloud glows evenly in all directions.
It can be assumed that the glow of interplanetary space inside the system causes the comets to break up into dust and gases. But in this regard, another discovery was made. The NASA New Horizons probe measured the background glow in our system far beyond the planets and the asteroid belt, namely at a distance of 6.4 to 8 billion km from the Sun and also detected a weak background glow, the nature of which scientists have not yet can prove.
So far, astronomers agree that the nature of the internal background glow and the external one may differ. How things really are remains to be seen. The SKYSURF program only outlined the problem, and it will have to be solved in new experiments.
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