The night sky may appear like an inky black canvas, but astronomers are still attempting to answer the questions: “how dark can the night sky get?” and “will there be any light leftover after that?”

It’s not exactly possible, or advisable, to go across the cosmos turning out the lights in the form of the sun, other stars, or distant galaxies, so a team of researchers did the next best thing…They went through a whopping 200,000 images collected by the Hubble Space Telescope, systematically making measurements to account for the light from our solar system in order to hunt for any background glow that remains and is thus from an unknown source. The work was carried out as part of an initiative called “SKYSURF.”…

The discovery is similar to turning out all the lights in your room, drawing the curtains, shuttering the windows, and still observing a ghostly glow filling the room…

Not to worry though; there’s definitely a scientific explanation for this eerie leftover glow. The team may have been surprised by this spooky solar system glow, but they have a few ideas about its origins.

For geeks like me, half the fun remaining after finding a question like this one…is learning the answer.