SKYSURF ILLUSTRATION (IMAGE)

NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center

SKYSURF ILLUSTRATION

Caption

This artist's illustration shows the location and size of a hypothetical cloud of dust surrounding our solar system. Astronomers searched through 200,000 images and made tens of thousands of measurements from Hubble Space Telescope to discover a residual background glow in the sky. Because the glow is so smoothly distributed, the likely source is innumerable comets – free-flying dusty snowballs of ice. They fall in toward the Sun from all different directions, spewing out an exhaust of dust as the ices sublimate due to heat from the Sun. If real, this would be a newly discovered architectural element of the solar system.

Credit

NASA, ESA, and Andi James (STScI)

Usage Restrictions

No restrictions.

License

Public Domain

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