Space Isn’t As Dark As We Know It

Astronomers have been asking one question for decades: is space really as black as we think it is? Well, NASA’s New Horizons space mission might have just given us the answer. After exploring Pluto, the spacecraft kept going and is now billions of miles away from Earth. This means it’s far from all the light pollution we get from sources like the sun and dust particles around our planet.

Scientists used the spacecraft’s simple camera to take images of what looked like incredibly boring blank space, free of bright stars or anything else that could scatter light back into the camera. They then processed these images to remove all known sources of visible light. Once they’d removed the light from stars, plus scattered light from the Milky Way, they were left with light coming in from beyond our own galaxy.

But here’s the surprising part: they found that there was still plenty of unexplained light. In fact, it was about equal to all the light coming in from the known galaxies. That means there’s just as much light outside of galaxies as inside them!

So where does all this light come from? Well, it could be coming from sources we haven’t yet discovered, like small, faint dwarf galaxies or unknown phenomena out in the universe. Or it could be associated with dark matter, which is still a mystery to scientists. With this groundbreaking research, we can say that space isn’t as dark as we know it.

What if we take all the light from the stars and galaxies out there and throw in some gas and dust clouds? What color do we get? Beige. This leads us to another question. Do we still need the Sun if our space is colorful? And the short answer is yes, we do.

The colors of space are a result of the interactions of light with different celestial objects, such as stars, galaxies, and gas clouds. While these colors are fascinating to observe, they do not provide the energy life on Earth needs to survive. There you go! Don’t expect to see the color of the sky and space.