Unexplained Light

About a month before the great December conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, NASA researchers announced a separate, unexpected discovery: evidence of light in deep space without an explainable source. After studying photographs taken by the New Horizons space probe, which is now 4 billion miles away but still beaming footage to Earth, NASA came across an unexplained “glow.” It was in areas particularly distant from the known sources of light, such as stars and galaxies, and from sources of reflected light, such as dust particles. In fact, one astronomer told NPR that the amount of unexplained light was about equal to the light coming from sources they could identify. 

The NPR article described the “problem” this creates for scientists: “… for 400 years, astronomers have been studying visible light and the sky in a serious way and yet somehow apparently ‘missed half the light in the universe.’” The choice astronomers face is either to double-down on the known explanations for light or be open to new ones…

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