April 11 (UPI) — Scientists have struggled to define the upper limit of the cosmic optical background, the total amount of light produced by all of the galaxies in the universe. But new observations from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft have allowed astronomers to place a ceiling on the measurement.
“Determining how much light comes from all the galaxies beyond our own Milky Way galaxy has been a stubborn challenge in observational astrophysics,” Michael Zemcov, an assistant professor of astrophysics at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said in a news release.
The reflection of the sunlight off interplanetary space dust makes the task of measuring the cosmic optical background from Earth quite difficult.
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