The ship that approached Pluto

It happened ten years ago. New Horizons approached the surface of Pluto more than any other spacecraft in history. It flew to less than 13,000 kilometers on the surface. On the occasion of this ephemeris, NASA has published an image with improved colors. The ship that approached Pluto left this beautiful image.

It was taken when New Horizons was approximately 450,000 kilometers away. Last April, NASA New Horizons probe measurements provided the first map of the Lyman-Alfa emission galaxy. It is an important ultraviolet wavelength. And offers a new perspective of the region surrounding our solar system.

Ultraviolet light

The findings are described in a new study of the New Horizons mission team. The SWRI (Southwest Research Institute) directs it and was published in The Astronomical Journal.

Lyman-Alfa is a specific ultraviolet wavelength emitted and dispersed by hydrogen atoms. It is especially useful for astronomers studying distant stars, galaxies and the interstellar half. This can help detect the composition, temperature and movement of these distant objects.

It happened during his initial trip to Pluto. New Horizons compiled reference data on Lyman-Alfa emissions using the Alice instrument. It is an ultraviolet spectrograph developed by Swri. A spectrograph is a tool that astronomers use to decompose light in their different colors. Alice specializes in the gample length of the distant ultraviolet.

Scanning the sky

Once the main objectives of the ship approaching Pluto were completed, the scientists used Alice to conduct broader and frequent studies of Lyman-Alfa emissions as New Horizons moved away from the Sun. These studies included an extensive set of scanning in 2023. And they loaded approximately 83 % of the sky.

They managed to isolate the emissions of the galaxy. The New Horizons team modeled the scattered solar emissions and subtracted them from the spectrograph data. The results indicate a practically uniform background in the sky. It is ten times more intense than expected according to previous estimates.