As black as space may seem, even the darkest corner of the universe gets light. Measuring that tiny glimmer — called the cosmic optical background (COB) — sheds light on the energy balance of the ...

Banner image: Artist's depiction of the New Horizons spacecraft billions of miles from Earth. (Credit: NASA, APL, SwRI, Serge Brunier/ESO, Marc Postman/STScI, Dan Durda) Scientists have traveled to ...

Images taken by NASA’s New Horizons mission on its way to Pluto, and now the Kuiper Belt, have given scientists an unexpected tool for measuring the brightness of all the galaxies in the universe, ...

Over billions of years, the universe's stars and galaxies shined their light into space, leaving behind an imperceptibly faint night light known as the cosmic optical background. NASA's New Horizons ...

Even when you remove the bright stars, the glowing dust and other nearby points of light from the inky, dark sky, a background glow remains. That glow comes from the cosmic sea of distant galaxies, ...

Scientists have traveled to the edges of the solar system, virtually, at least, to capture the most accurate measurements to date of the faint glow that permeates the universe—a phenomenon known as ...