AAS Journal Author Series: Rosalia O’Brien on 026ApJ..1000....6O

Rosalia O’Brien (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Arizona State University) chats about her article on an improved zodiacal light model that incorporates analytical forms of both the scattering phase function and albedo as a function of wavelength, which are empirically determined across optical wavelengths (0.3–1.6 μm) from over 5000 HST sky surface brightness measurements. This refined model results in significantly improved predictions of zodiacal light emission at these wavelengths and for Sun angles greater than 80°, with fits to HST data show an uncertainty in the model of ∼4.5%. Remarkably, the measurements show an excess of residual diffuse light of 0.013 ± 0.006 MJy sr−1, which suggests that a very dim spherical dust cloud may need to be included in the zodiacal light model. SKYSURF-11: A New Zodiacal Light Model Optimized for Optical Wavelengths https://scixplorer.org/abs/2026ApJ..1... Rosalia's web presence: https://rosaliaobrien.github.io The intended audience for the AAS Journal Author Series is active researchers.