One of Earth’s shimmering dust clouds has been spotted at last

Meet the Kordylewski dust clouds, shimmering pseudo-satellites that orbit Earth near the moon. A team of Hungarian astronomers say they have spotted light scattered from one of these clouds, providing evidence that the clouds really exist after nearly 60 years of controversy.

The twin dust clouds gather at two of the points in space where the gravity of Earth and the moon cancel each other out. That gravitational stability makes these spots, called Lagrange points, good places to park spacecraft. They also could trap interplanetary debris.

No one had seen any dust clouds since 1961, when Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski reported the first sighting at two gravity holes, L4 and L5. Some astronomers thought that the sun’s stronger gravity would periodically sweep dust out of L4 and L5, making it hard for the areas to support clouds.

Astronomers Judit Slíz-Balogh, András Barta and Gábor Horváth, all of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, looked for the clouds using specially designed filters. These filters detect light that’s been polarized, or had its electromagnetic waves aligned, by bouncing around the dust grains.