A Measurement of the Cosmic Optical Background and Diffuse Galactic Light Scaling from the R < 50 AU New Horizons-LORRI Data

Understand

Direct photometric measurements of the cosmic optical background (COB) provide an important point of comparison to both other measurement methodologies and models of cosmic structure formation, and permit a cosmic consistency test with the potential to reveal additional diffuse sources of emission.

• The COB has been challenging to measure from Earth due to the difficulty of isolating it from the diffuse light scattered from interplanetary dust in our solar system.
• We present a measurement of the COB using data taken by the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on NASA's New Horizons mission, considering all data acquired to 47 AU.
• We employ a blind methodology where our analysis choices are developed against a subset of the full data set, which is then unblinded.