How dark is the night?
You may not even notice that it’s dark if you stand outside at night when there is no moon. If you look up at the sky, it’s not that dark. It is possible that light pollution in your area is so bad you can see only a few stars.
Even in rural areas our skies are so brilliant that the Milky Way can’t be seen. In North America or Europe, only a quarter have seen it.
Travel to a very remote area of the world to escape the light pollution.
One of the remotest places is the Andean Desert, located in Chile. If you are able to visit the main observatories, you will be able to see some of the darkest sky in the world.
A moonless night, with the Milky Way above you, will reveal a sea of stars. Shadow constellationsAlong the multicolored glow from the galactic centre. The skies are so black that you can only see the Milky Way when your eyes have been dark-adapted.
Even so, it is still not a true dark sky. Our atmosphere It emits a slight glow, even on the darkest nights. The upper atmosphere of Earth is ionized by cosmic rays and ultraviolet sunlight.
The airglow doesn’t show up when you look directly at it, but it is there and limits the view from Earth-based telescopes. Even the best telescopes have to contend with light pollution.
We launch telescopes in space. Hubble and Webb have a clear view of the universe beyond our atmosphere.
Despite their amazing images, they can’t capture a truly dark sky. The problem of sunglow remains. Every particle of dust in our Solar System scatters light toward Earth. This dust-scattered light is visible on Earth as the zodiacal glow. Even though it’s dim to our eyes, it is visible in space. Interplanetary space’s night is not as dark as it could be.
We would have to go beyond the dust to the outermost edge of our Solar System to see the real dark sky. This is far beyond the Pluto orbit. Pioneers 10 and 11 as well as Voyagers 1, 2, and 3 have all traveled to that distance. The Pioneers have long since lost contact, and we can still communicate with Voyagers but they cannot send us any useful images.
There is one distant spacecraft which can.
New Horizons flew by Pluto in 2015 and then passed the Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth. The spacecraft is twice as far from the Sun and still has cameras that can collect data.
New Horizons recently attempted to capture the fragile darkness that is the Universe. New Horizons was pointed at a patch far from the Milky Way and the Sun. They then measure the amount of light that was captured by the camera.
Astronomers couldn’t explain the faint glow that they observed when they compared Hubble’s dark sky view to their own.
You can calculate the amount of background light from galaxies that are far away. big bangNew Horizons measured roughly twice as much. The team will observe 15 more dark locations in the coming month to confirm this mysterious background glow or see the naked darkness of the cosmos.
We will find light even in the most darkest skies.
This article originally appeared on Universe Today. You can read the Original article.
