""Tentative Detection of Small Scale Structure in the Cosmic Infrared Background From Long Exposure 2MASS Fields"

This is what the sky looks like when you remove (black spots) all of the foreground stars in the Milky Way that can be seen with the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). What is left is the mottled light from very distant galaxies in the universe.

Although you cannot identify individual galaxies, their combined faint light can be detected in this image using mathematical analysis.

This is what the sky looks like at a wavelength of 2.1 microns before the stars were removed.

In this very deep image, based on nearly 4000 seconds of data, we are seeing stars over one million times fainter than the naked eye, at a wavelength of 2.1 microns in the infrared. The faintest objects have a magnitude of about +20.0 at this wavelength.

Only the brightest handful of these stars with magnitudes of +15.0 are recorded in the standard 2MASS images which are obtained with 7.8 seconds of data.

Here is the mathematical analysis of the top image. What this graph shows on the horizontal axis is the angular size of the clumpiness in the top image in angular seconds of arc. The vertical axis shows how much 'power' there is in the image at a particular angular scale. The difference between '-7' and '-4' is a factor of 1000.

The lower set of points is the data in which alternate images have been subtracted to eliminate the 'sky' signal. The data are 'flat line' and have no correlated structure.