NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft has completed its flybys of Pluto and Arrakoth and is now about 8 billion kilometers from Earth. Although astronomers are looking for another Kuiper Belt target, they can send it towards; the spacecraft is perfectly positioned to look at the Universe itself. At such a great distance, the spacecraft is beyond the dust that causes light pollution in the inner Solar System, darker than the darker skies on Earth. This unique vantage point will measure just how dark the Universe is.
. It’s caused by ultraviolet sunlight and cosmic rays which ionize Earth’s upper atmosphere. This airglow isn’t noticeable when we look directly overhead, but it’s there, and it limits the view of Earth-based telescopes. Even our best observatories have to deal with light pollution.
So we launch telescopes into space. Beyond our atmosphere, the Hubble and Webb telescopes surely get a pure view of the sky. Wondrous as their images are, they don’t capture the truly dark sky. Sunglow is still an issue. Our solar system is filled with diffuse dust, and every particle scatters light back toward our world. On Earth, we can see this dust-scattered glow as the zodiacal light. It’s faint to our eyes, but visible even in space.
To get a real view of the dark sky, we would need to travel beyond the dust, to the furthest edge of our solar system. Far beyond the orbit of Pluto. Voyagers I and II have traveled that far, as have Pioneers 10 and 11. We’ve long lost contact with the Pioneers, and while we still communicate with the Voyagers, they can’t transmit any useful images to us. But there is a distant spacecraft that can.
New Horizons flew past Pluto in 2015, and then past the Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth. It is now twice as distant from the Sun, and its cameras can still gather data. Recently the New Horizons team tried to capture the fragile darkness of the universe. They aimed New Horizons at a patch of sky far away from the Milky Way, away from the Sun, and away from bright stars. Then they measure how much light the camera captured.
When they compared that amount to the amount captured by Hubble’s view of dark sky, they found it was darker by an expected amount, but there is still some faint glow astronomers can’t explain. If you calculate the background light you’d expect from distant galaxies all the way back to the big bang, New Horizons measured about twice as much.
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