Tag : Brighter

Washington: Scientists analyzed new measurements showing that the light emitted by stars outside our galaxy is two to three times brighter than the light from known populations of galaxies, challenging assumptions about the number and environment of stars in the universe. Results of the study led by researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology have been posted to ArXiv and accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. The research team analyzed hundreds of images of background light taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on NASA's New Horizons mission to calculate the cosmic optical background (COB) -- the sum of light emitted by stars beyond the Milky Way over the history of the universe. If the COB brightness doesn't equal the light from galaxies we know about, it suggests there might be missing sources of optical light in the universe. "We see more light than we should see based on the populations of galaxies that we understand to exist and how much light we estimate they should produce," said Teresa Symons '22 Ph.D. (astrophysical sciences and technology), who led the study for her dissertation and is now a postdoctoral researcher at University of California Irvine. "Determining what is producing that light could change our fundamental understanding of how the universe formed over time." Earlier this year, an independent team of scientists reported the COB was twice as large as originally believed in Astrophysical Journal Letters. Those results were no fluke, as corroborated using a much broader set of LORRI observations in the new study by Symons, RIT Associate Professor Michael Zemcov, and researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, UC Irvine, UC Berkeley, and Johns Hopkins University. ...