Outer Space Just Got a Little Brighter The universe is not as black as astronomers once thought. Click here.
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Outer Space Just Got a Little Brighter
The universe is not as black as astronomers once thought.
The universe is a shade too bright.
That might be the last news you expected to hear toward the darkening end of a dark year. But that is what a band of astronomers has discovered, using cameras on the New Horizons spacecraft that once visited Pluto to measure the darkness of interplanetary space.
“There’s something out there unknown,” said Tod Lauer, of the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Tucson, Ariz. “The universe is not completely dark, and we don’t yet completely know what it comprises.”
Four billion miles from the sun, far from bright planets and the light scattered by interplanetary dust, empty space was about twice as bright as would be expected Dr. Lauer and his colleagues found. The most likely explanation, he said, was that there were more very faint galaxies or star clusters contributing to the background light of the universe than their models indicated. Or even that black holes in the centers of otherwise undistinguished galaxies were pumping extra energy into the void.
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