Outer Space Just Got a Little Brighter - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/science/astronomy-cosmos-blackness.html
“There’s something out there unknown,” said Tod Lauer, of the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Tucson, Ariz. “The universe is not completely dark, and we don’t yet completely know what it comprises.”
Four billion miles from the sun, far from bright planets and the light scattered by interplanetary dust, empty space was about twice as bright as would be expected Dr. Lauer and his colleagues found. The most likely explanation, he said, was that there were more very faint galaxies or star clusters contributing to the background light of the universe than their models indicated. Or even that black holes in the centers of otherwise undistinguished galaxies were pumping extra energy into the void.
A less exciting possibility, Dr. Lauer said in an email, was that “we messed up and missed a light source or camera artifact that we should have figured out. This is what I worry about the most.”