Ultraviolet to optical diffuse sky emission as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope Faint Object Spectrograph

Abstract

We present an analysis of the blank sky spectra observed with the Faint Object Spectrograph on board the Hubble Space Telescope. We study the diffuse sky emission from ultraviolet to optical wavelengths, which is composed of the zodiacal light (ZL), diffuse Galactic light (DGL), and residual emission. The observations were performed toward 54 fields distributed widely over the sky, with the spectral coverage from 0.2 to 0.7 um. In order to avoid contaminating light from the earthshine, we use the data collected only in orbital nighttime. The observed intensity is decomposed into the ZL, DGL, and residual emission, in eight photometric bands spanning our spectral coverage. We found that the derived ZL reflectance spectrum is flat in the optical, which indicates major contribution of C-type asteroids to the interplanetary dust (IPD). In addition, the ZL reflectance spectrum has an absorption feature at ~0.3 um. The shape of the DGL spectrum is consistent with those found in earlier measurements and model predictions. While the residual emission contains a contribution from the extragalactic background light, we found that the spectral shape of the residual looks similar to the ZL spectrum. Moreover, its optical intensity is much higher than that measured from beyond the IPD cloud by Pioneer10/11, and also than that of the integrated galaxy light. These findings may indicate the presence of an isotropic ZL component, which is missed in the conventional ZL models.