Confirmed: two clouds of dust orbiting the Earth

Hungarian astronomers and physicists have confirmed the existence of two clouds of dust only 400,000 kilometers from the Earth. Its existence had been questioned for decades

A team of Hungarian astronomers and physicists has confirmed that two clouds of dust gravitate around 400,000 kilometers from the Earth.

The new work appears in the Monthly Notices magazine of the Royal Astronomical Society. The clouds, reported for the first time and named by the Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski in 1961, are very weak and their existence is controversial.

As explained by the Royal Astronomical Society, the Earth-Moon system has five points of stability where gravitational forces maintain the relative position of the objects that are found there. Two of these so-called Lagrange points, L4 and L5, form a triangle of equal sides with the Earth and the Moon and move around the Earth as the Moon moves on its orbit.

L4 and L5 are not completely stable because they are disturbed by the gravitational force of the Sun. However, it is thought that they are places where interplanetary dust could accumulate, at least temporarily. Kordylewski observed two groups of dust near L5 in 1961, with several reports since, but their extreme weakness makes them difficult to detect and many scientists have questioned their existence.

In this article, scientists from Eötvös Loránd University modeled clouds to evaluate their formation and detection. The researchers looked at their appearance using polarizing filters, which transmit light with a particular direction of oscillation, similar to those found in certain types of sunglasses. The scattered or reflected light is always more or less polarized depending on the angle of diffusion or reflection.

Then they went looking for clouds of dust. With a linear polarization filter system connected to a camera lens and a CCD detector at Judit Slíz-Balogh's private observatory in Hungary (Badacsonytördemic), scientists have exposed the alleged location of Kordylewski's cloud in point L5.

According to Science Daily, the images they have obtained show polarized light reflected in the dust, far beyond the field of view of the camera's lens. The observed pattern coincides with the predictions made by the same group of researchers in a previous paper and is consistent with early Kordylewski cloud observations six decades ago. The Horváth group was able to eliminate optical artifacts and other effects, which means that the presence of the dust cloud is confirmed.

ABC notes that L4 and L5 are considered as potential sites for space probes in orbit and as transfer stations for missions exploring the wider solar system. There are also proposals for storing contaminants at both points. Future research will analyze L4 and L5 layers, as well as associated Kordylewski clouds, to understand their stability and determine if their dust poses a threat to teams and future astronauts.