Measurement of the zodiacal light absolute intensity through Fraunhofer line spectroscopy of the night sky with the Hale telescope

Abstract

Measuring the absolute brightness of the zodiacal light (ZL), which is the sunlight scattered by interplanetary dust particles, is important not only for understanding the physical properties of the dust but also for constraining the extragalactic background light (EBL) by subtracting the ZL foreground. We describe the results of high-resolution spectroscopic observations of the night sky in the wavelength range of 300–900 nm with the double spectrograph on the Hale telescope to determine the absolute brightness of the ZL continuum spectra from the Fraunhofer absorption line intensities. The observed fields are part of the fields observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope for the EBL study. Assuming that the spectral shape of the zodiacal light is identical to the solar spectrum in a narrow region around the Fraunhofer lines, we decomposed the observed sky brightness into multiple emission components by amplitude parameter fitting with spectral templates of the airglow, ZL, diffuse Galactic light, integrated starlight, and other isotropic components including EBL. As a result, the ZL component with the Ca ii λλ 393.3, 396.8 nm Fraunhofer lines around 400 nm is clearly separated from the others in all fields with uncertainties around 20%, mainly due to the template errors and the time variability of the airglow. The observed ZL brightness in most of the observed fields is consistent with the modeled ZL brightness calculated by combining the most conventional ZL model at 1250 nm based on the Diffuse Infrared Background Experiment and the observational ZL template spectrum based on the Hubble Space Telescope. However, the ecliptic plane observation is considerably fainter than the ZL model, and this discrepancy is discussed in terms of the optical properties of the interplanetary dust accreted in the ecliptic plane.