Now that it is passing through the Kuiper Belt, away from the light pollution of the inner Solar System, it has another lucrative mission: measuring the brightness of the Universe. These measurements will allow astronomers to make more accurate estimates of how many galaxies there are, which is still the subject of debate. According to new measures by New Horizons, the light coming from stars beyond the Milky Way is two to three times brighter than the light from known populations of galaxies — meaning that there are even more out there than we thought!

What’s new — The study was led by a team from the Center for Detectors (CfD), an academic research group at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). They were joined by researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Space Exploration Sector (SES) at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL), the University of California Irvine, and the Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) at UC Berkeley. The paper that describes their findings recently appeared online and has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

In the grand scheme of the cosmic story, a single year isn’t all that significant. But over time, the annual changes really add up!

What causes meteor Showers?

Meteor showers are a cool reminder that we live on a giant ball of rock flying through space. As it circles the Sun, Earth sometimes runs into dusty debris trailing in the wake of comets — or, in the case of the Quadrantids, the wake of a small asteroid. Dust grains fall into our atmosphere, and they’re moving so fast that the friction of the air rushing past is enough to disintegrate them, creating the tiny streaks of light we see during meteor showers.

Most of our planet’s encounters with these dusty debris trails happen at about the same point in its orbit, so you can think of annual meteor showers like the Quadrantids as Earth passing a familiar landmark in space.