New Synoptic Observations of the Cosmic Optical Background with New Horizons

2024/07/08 by Marc Postman, Postman, Marc, Tod R. Lauer +34 · 1 voice · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #History and Developments in Astronomy #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.CO #astro-ph.GA

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2407.06273

arxiv published 2024/07/08 · arxiv updated 2024/07/13

Abstract

We obtained New Horizons LORRI images to measure the cosmic optical background (COB) intensity integrated over 0.4\lesssimλ\lesssim0.9~\rmμm. The survey comprises 16 high Galactic-latitude fields selected to minimize scattered diffuse Galactic light (DGL) from the Milky Way galaxy, as well as scattered light from bright stars. This work supersedes an earlier analysis based on observations of one of the present fields. Isolating the COB contribution to the raw total sky levels measured in the fields requires subtracting the remaining scattered light from bright stars and galaxies, intensity from faint stars within the fields fainter than the photometric detection-limit, and the DGL foreground. DGL is estimated from Planck HFI 350 ~\rmμm and 550 ~\rmμm intensities, using a new self-calibrated indicator based on the 16 fields augmented with eight additional DGL calibration fields obtained as part of the survey. The survey yields a highly significant detection (6.8σ) of the COB at \rm 11.16± 1.65~(1.47~sys,~0.75~ran) ~nW ~m^-2 ~sr^-1 at the LORRI pivot wavelength of 0.608 μm. The estimated integrated intensity from background galaxies, \rm 8.17± 1.18 ~nW ~m^-2 ~sr^-1, can account for the great majority of this signal. The rest of the COB signal, \rm 2.99±2.03~ (1.75~sys,~1.03~ran) ~nW ~m^-2 ~sr^-1, is formally classified as anomalous intensity but is not significantly different from zero. The simplest interpretation is that the COB is completely due to galaxies.

Cited by

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• SKYSURF-11: A New Zodiacal Light Model Optimized for Optical Wavelengths
• SKYSURF-10: A Novel Method for Measuring Integrated Galaxy Light
• Integrated Galaxy Light from Stacking 10⁵ Random Pointings in the Dark Energy Survey Data

Discussions

• The cosmic optical background of the Universe is completely consistent with the intensity expected from integrating over all known galaxies over the all time. arxiv.org/abs/2407.06273 [bsky, 4 points, 1 comments]

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