(ORDO NEWS) — Astronomers at the Rochester Institute of Technology (USA) have confirmed that the light emitted by stars outside the Milky Way is several times brighter than the total light from known galaxy clusters.
The results of the study, cast doubt on assumptions about the number of stars in the universe.
The scientists analyzed hundreds of images of the extragalactic light background taken by the LORRI camera aboard the New Horizons spacecraft at distances up to 47 astronomical units from Earth.
Now this probe is located at the edge of the solar system, where there is no interplanetary dust that scatters light and creates a light background in the foreground.
To measure extragalactic light, the researchers ruled out sources such as stars in the Milky Way, interstellar dust, and faint objects of unknown origin.
The surface brightness of the extragalactic optical background turned out to be about 22 nanowatts per square meter per steradian (a unit of solid angle
). This confirmed the previous result, according to which the light outside the Milky Way is 2-3 times brighter than the light from all galaxies.
A possible explanation is that there are many more light sources in the universe than are known to astronomers, but their nature is still unknown.
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