SKYSURF tagged posts

Hubble Detects Ghostly Glow Surrounding Our Solar System

This artist’s illustration shows the location and size of a hypothetical cloud of dust surrounding our solar system. Astronomers searched through 200,000 images and made tens of thousands of measurements from Hubble Space Telescope to discover a residual background glow in the sky. Because the glow is so smoothy distributed, the likely source is innumerable comets – free-flying dusty snowballs of ice. 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. If real, this would be a newly discovered architectural element of the solar system.
Credits: NASA, ESA, and Andi James (STScI)

Aside from a tapestry of glittering stars, and the glow of the waxing and waning Moon, the nighttime sky looks inky black to...

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