Researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology have conducted a study with new measurements showing that light emitted by stars outside our galaxy is two to three times brighter than light from known populations of galaxies. These findings challenge previous assumptions about the number and environment of stars in the universe. The results of the research were accepted for publication. Astrophysical Journal and is currently available on ArXiv.

The research team analyzed hundreds of images of background light taken by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) during NASA’s New Horizons mission to calculate the cosmic optical background (COB), which is the sum of the light emitted by stars outside the Milky Way. history of the universe. If the brightness of COB is not equal to the light of galaxies as we know it, there may be no optical light source in the universe.

Theresa Simons ’22, Ph.D. (Astrophysical Sciences and Technology) is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw research for his thesis. “Determining what produces this light could change our basic understanding of how the universe formed over time.”

Earlier this year, an independent team of scientists reported that the COB is twice as large as originally thought in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Simons, RIT Assoc. University.

While measuring a COB not obscured from Earth due to interplanetary dust is difficult, the New Horizons spacecraft is at this foreground minimal edge of our solar system and provides a much sharper view for this type of study. The scientists hope that future missions and tools can be developed to help investigate this discrepancy.

“It got to the point where there was a real mystery to be solved,” said Zemtsov, a research professor at RIT’s Detector Center and School of Physics and Astronomy. “I hope some of the experiments we’re involved in at RIT, including CIBER-2 and SPHEREx, will help us resolve this discrepancy.”