The Universe is Brighter Than we Thought

The first mission to flyby of a dwarf planet was conducted by the New Horizons mission. Data and images of objects in the inner and outer Solar System were provided in the lead up to the encounter. It embarked on a new mission to make the first encounter with a Kuiper Belt object. The flyby took place about four years ago. There is a new year with a new name.

Now that it is out of the glare of the Solar System's light pollution, it wants to measure the brightness of the universe. Accurately estimating the number of galaxies is still a subject of debate. The light from stars beyond the Milky Way is two to three times brighter than the light from known populations of galaxies, which means that there are even more out there than we thought.

A team from the Center for Detectors led the study. They were joined by researchers from NASA, the University of California Irvine, and the Space Sciences Laboratory at UC Berkeley. The paper that describes their findings has been accepted for publication.

The Cosmic Optical Background (COB) is the diffuse light given off by all the stars and galaxies in the Universe together. Astronomers like this value because it allows them to take an inventory of all the normal matter in the universe. This is a challenge on Earth because of the interference caused by sunlight and the way it's reflected by ice particles in the Solar System.

Dust between planets that creates foreground light is what causes space-based telescopes to be interfered with. It's not a big deal for a mission like New Horizons to have a light in the foreground. In order to calculate the COB, the team analyzed hundreds of images taken by the LORRI. A researcher at the University of California Irvine led the study while studying for her PhD at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She explained in a RIT press release.

“We see more light than we should see based on the populations of galaxies that we understand to exist and how much light we estimate they should produce. Determining what is producing that light could change our fundamental understanding of how the universe formed over time.”

The researchers from the Space Telescope Science Institute found that the COB was brighter than anticipated. An independent team of scientists found that the COB was twice as large as previously thought. The new results show that there must be more light sources in the universe than we know.

The distance between the Earth and the Sun is less than 5 billion miles, but the mission is still more than 55.85AU from Earth. Calculating the number of people in the universe is easier at this distance where the foreground light is less. This discrepancy can be explored further with the help of future missions and instruments.

Caltech's Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment-2 (CIber-2) and NASA's Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) are two of the Caltech's Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment Michael Zemcov is a researcher at NASA JPL and a professor at the RIT School of physics and astronomy.

He said that the mystery needed to be solved. I hope that some of the experiments we are involved in can help resolve the discrepancy.

The Rochester Institute of Technology is read further.