All you need to know about the mystery of the "ghost glow" of the solar system

 

Astronomers have found a mysterious "ghostly glow" surrounding our solar system, and they are not sure where it came from, RT reported.

Scientists say the faint glow persists even when other light sources, such as stars and planets, are released.

 

Scientists made the discovery when astronomers set out to see how dark space could be, which they did by examining 200,000 images taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, removing predicted light sources (stars and planets) and looking for any background glow. They found a small excess of light prevalent.

Scientists found that the amount of light is small and equivalent to 10 fireflies (luminous beetles) scattered all over the sky around our solar system. But scientists are still puzzled by the glow, and they still need to know exactly where it came from.

 

The flare may be caused by an unknown structure within our solar system, scientists have speculated. It may include a ball of dust made up of comets falling into the solar system, which reflect sunlight.

 

However, this dust envelope remains hypothetical, and if it were real, it would be a change in our understanding of the structure of the solar system.

 

In 2021, the New Horizons probe also detected a small amount of background light in the solar system. This light also remains unexplained, and proposed possible explanations have included a cluster of distant galaxies hidden to decaying dark matter.

However, the light observed by New Horizons was less intense than that found in Hubble images. This may be because New Horizons was far away, about 4 or 5 billion miles from the sun.

 

This leads scientists to believe that light comes from within our nearby solar system.

 

Taken together, the two results suggest that the solar system may contain some elements that have not been measured before.

 

The findings are reported in new papers published in The Astronomical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal Letters.