One of NASA’s Furthest Probes Just Gave Us a Look at Just How Dark the Universe is Beyond Our Solar System

Amaze Lab

The New Horizons space probe and it is currently way, way out in space. And recently it was tasked with measuring just how dark it is way out there in the black.

Transcript

00:00This is the New Horizons space probe, and it's currently way, way out there.

00:09Right now, the spacecraft is around 60 astronomical units from the sun, or around twice the distance

00:14from the solar system center as Neptune.

00:17And recently, because it's the most advanced bit of tech to ever make it that far away,

00:21it was tasked with measuring just how dark it is way out there in the black.

00:24You may remember back in 2021, New Horizons attempted to measure this very thing and returned

00:29some strange results.

00:31At that time, its instruments detected far brighter background light than expected, something

00:35which has perplexed astronomers ever since.

00:37However, experts say that measuring anything that resides outside the solar system is like

00:42trying to measure a room from within a fishbowl.

00:44Everything gets a bit distorted.

00:46So how much light is out there between galaxies?

00:48Astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, Mark Postman, explained, the results

00:52show that the great majority of visible light we receive from the universe was generated

00:56in galaxies.

00:57Importantly, we also found that there is no evidence for significant levels of light produced

01:02by sources not presently known to astronomers.

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