Astronomers Detects
Surprising Cosmic Light
Astronomers at Caltech and their colleagues
have detected a diffuse cosmic glow that
appears to represent more light than that
produced by known galaxies in the
universe. They made the discovery using an
experiment carried into space on a NASA
suborbital rocket.
The researchers, including Caltech Professor of
Physics Jamie Bock and Caltech Senior
Postdoctoral Fellow Michael Zemcov, said that
the best explanation is that the cosmic light
described in a paper published November 7 in
the journal Science, originates from stars that
were stripped away from their parent galaxies
and flung out into space as those galaxies
collided and merged with other galaxies.
The discovery suggests that many such
previously undetected stars permeate what had
been thought to be dark spaces between
galaxies, forming an interconnected sea of
stars. “Measuring such large fluctuations
surprised us, but we carried out many tests to
show the results are reliable,” says Zemcov,
who led the study.
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