Scientists Discover Outer Space Isn't Pitch-Black After All

Look up at the night sky and, if you're away from city lights, you'll see stars. The space between those bright points of light is, of course, filled with inky blackness.

Some astronomers have wondered about that all that dark space — about how dark it really is.

"Is space truly black?" says Tod Lauer, an astronomer with the National Science Foundation's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) in Arizona. He says if you could look at the night sky without stars, galaxies and everything else known to give off visible light, "does the universe itself put out a glow?"