NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has made an incredible and perplexing discovery as it journeys to the edge of the Solar System, turning its gaze into interstellar space.
Contrary to the dark void that scientists expected New Horizons to encounter, the spacecraft’s highly sensitive instruments have revealed a world illuminated by something extraordinarily mysterious and bizarre, described as “excessive” light.
The New Horizons spacecraft and its original target, Pluto. However, it has long surpassed this goal and is now preparing to enter the space beyond the stars – (Photo: NASA).
Specifically, New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) has detected very faint light, as if emanating from the void of interstellar space.
According to Science Alert, a small amount of light in this region—known as “cosmic optical background”—is the dim glow of bright objects outside the Solar System, which had been anticipated. However, the peculiar finding is that New Horizons recorded double the amount of light that was expected to exist there.
A recently published study in the journal Physical Review Letters suggests that this excess light could likely originate from one of the most elusive entities in the universe: Dark Matter.
Dark matter is believed to account for about 80% of the universe but is too elusive to be seen. However, a team of scientists led by astrophysicist José Luis Bernal from Johns Hopkins University (USA) has indicated that interactions involving dark matter may produce visible light, which is precisely the excess light detected by New Horizons.
They developed mathematical models and determined that a hypothesized type of dark matter known as axions could be responsible for this phenomenon.
This interaction also generates extremely faint and hard-to-detect energy, but scientists hope that by identifying the right approach, they can focus New Horizons’ highly sensitive ultraviolet instruments on specific areas to validate this hypothesis with more concrete signals.
NASA also has the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which have traveled much farther than New Horizons. However, due to the decades-old technology on these spacecraft, they may not have detected what the “younger” New Horizons has just seen.
NASA and astronomers worldwide continue to anticipate new discoveries from New Horizons as it gradually breaks free from the final frontiers of the Solar System and explores deep space with its ultra-sensitive instruments.
