Extragalactic background light: inventory of light throughout the cosmic history
ABSTRACT The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) stands for the mean surface brightness of the sky as we would see it from a representative vantage point in the intergalactic space outside of our Milky Way Galaxy. Averaged over the whole 4π solid angle it represents the collective light from all luminous matter radiated throughout the cosmic history. Part of the EBL is resolved into galaxies that, with the increasing detecting power of giant telescopes and sensitive detectors, are seen to deeper and deeper limiting magnitudes. This resolved part is now known to contribute a substantial or even the major part of the EBL. There still remains, however, the challenge of finding out to what extent galaxies too faint or too diffuse to be discerned individually, individual stars or emission by gas outside the galaxies, or – more speculatively – some hitherto unknown light sources such as decaying elementary particles are accounting for the remaining EBL. We review the recent progress that has been made in the measurement of EBL. The current photometric results suggest that there is, beyond the resolved galaxies, an EBL component that cannot be explained by diffuse galaxy halos or intergalactic stars.