A detailed analysis of more than 200,000 archive images from the Hubble telescope showed that our system has a background glow of unknown origin in the planetary belt. The “ghost glow” region extends up to 5 billion km from the Sun. It’s like turning off the lights in a room, but the walls, floor and ceiling continue to shine. Scientists do not yet have a definitive explanation for this phenomenon. One of them is “dusty” comets.

The Hubble space observatory’s incredible sensitivity to the visible spectrum allows it to detect very faint photons. So far, astronomers have filtered out background photon sources to gather more information about observed objects. But some wondered: What would happen if we excluded stars, comets, planets, and other scattered light from small and large asteroids in the solar system from Hubble images? This is how the SKYSURF program was born to assess the background glow in our system.

The analysis helped make a discovery – up to a sphere with a radius of about 4.8 billion km, the sky itself glows uniformly with an intensity roughly equal to the light intensity of ten fireflies. Therefore, there is a structure in the solar system that emits light from the Sun, instead scattering it. And we are talking about structure, as this object or cloud shines evenly in all directions.

It can be hypothesized that the glow of interplanetary space inside the system caused the comets to shatter into dust and gas. However, another discovery was made in this one. NASA’s New Horizons probe measured the background glow far beyond the planets and asteroid belt in our system, 6.4 to 8 billion km from the Sun, and also detected a faint background glow, the nature of which scientists don’t yet know. knowing can prove

So far, astronomers agree that the nature of the inner background glow and the outer one may be different. It remains to be seen how things really are. The SKYSURF program has just flagged the problem and will need to be resolved in new experiments.