The night sky looked dark, as if space was nothing but black. But are there any regions darker in the abyss of space than others? Where is the darkest place in the solar system and in the entire universe? Portal livescience.com found it in question.
It is true that uninterrupted darkness is a rare phenomenon and surprisingly difficult to find. The reality is that there is a lot of dust in space, and dust scatters light, which allows the light of stars to spread far away and create a kind of “backlight” for much of the universe. It even has its own shade – it's called Space Latte.
Darkness can also be defined in many different ways. Light in the visible spectrum illuminates some parts of the universe, but waves in the electromagnetic spectrum, such as gamma rays or ultraviolet light, reach almost everything. That is, if we consider space throughout the electromagnetic spectrum, it will look quite bright.
But if we just take visible light then yes, there are very dark regions in space. Their darkness is influenced by a number of factors. First, space objects can be made of materials that absorb light, giving them a very dark appearance. There is a separate term for the amount of light reflected by a surface – albedo. An ideal mirror that reflects 100% of light has an albedo value of 1. And charcoal has an albedo of 4%.
The nucleus of Comet Borelli is considered one of the darkest spots in the solar system – at least according to the Guinness Book of Records. According to a 2001 image, the 5-mile-long comet, made of dust and ice, reflects less than 3% of sunlight. The darkest exoplanet known to science, TrES-2 b, reflects less than 1% of light, most likely due to high amounts of sodium vapor and titanium oxide gas in the atmosphere. By comparison, Earth reflects about 30% of sunlight.
Apparently black holes are also very dark because they absorb light passing through the event horizon. But this doesn't mean they don't have light at all – it's simply trapped. Conversely, viewed from the inside, the black hole will appear very bright to the human eye.
Darkness can also exist if something blocks the light of nearby stars. For example, some craters at the Moon's poles have never seen sunlight. They are very dark because they are in perpetual darkness. Similar craters on Pluto can also be quite dark because they are far from the Sun.
We must not forget the so-called. particles – dense molecular clouds of dust and gases. They were so dark they looked like holes in the sky. Why? Because the particles include molecular hydrogen, carbon oxide, helium and silicate dust. Such a mixture blocks almost all visible light from surrounding stars.
Finally, some areas of the sky are dark simply because the light source is far away. Such areas are on average 10 times darker than regions of near-Earth space. And the Earth, for a second, was in a relatively dark compartment of the Milky Way, allowing you to see quite far into space.
