Every day I post a short, pithy astronomy or space fact on Twitter and Google+. I call them BAFacts, and I have them all archived here on the blog. I try to make them as accurate as possible within the limitation of 140 characters. But I wrote one recently that, as it turns out, I had to retract for being incorrect. And Im happy about it! Heres why.

I recently was going through old posts and saw one that mentioned zodiacal light, a very faint glow in the sky that can only be seen on very dark nights. Its a band of light that follows the path of the planets across the sky, which is technically called the ecliptic. It passes through the constellations of the zodiac, hence its name*.

This picture of the zodiacal light is by friend of the BABlog Brad Goldpaint [click to embiggen, and note this is a part of a larger shot that's breathtaking]. The two bright "stars" are Venus and Jupiter, and you can see the glow from zodiacal light reaching up and to the left, following the ecliptic.

The origin of zodiacal light (when I learned about it, years ago) was thought to be dust from asteroid collisions. Asteroids out past Mars orbit pretty much in the same plane as the planets. When they smack into each other and they do they make dust. This reflects sunlight, so wed see it as a faint band of light across the ecliptic. Case closed!

Of course, regular readers know me better than this. Read on!

So I wrote up a BAFact and tweeted it:

It says, "#BAFact: Zodiacal light is sunlight reflecting dimly on wreckage from asteroid collisions. http://t.co/wZnQBZOY", and the link goes to the article I wrote a while back mentioning zodiacal light.

Once it was up, I went on my merry way for like three minutes. Luke Dones, who follows me on Twitter, tweeted this:

Read more from the original source:

The softly glowing zodiac: lesson learned | Bad Astronomy