After the so-called Dark Matter and Dark Energy, two miserably complex pillars of the invisible cosmological infrastructure, now "dark light" has started puzzling scientists.

Using data from Hubble, a team of scientists at CU Boulder has reached a conclusion that up to 80 per cent of light in the universe is "missing".

The scientists used a $70-million instrument on Hubble, called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, to study the 'tendrils' of hydrogen which link galaxies across the vast space. They detected an inconsistency that presently makes no sense.

They searched for charged ions in those tendrils of hydrogen that are generated when the gas is struck by ultra violet (UV) light. They found that tendrils were far more charged ions than what could be explained by the known UV light in the universe. The tendrils were in fact were charred up to 400 per cent more than their expectation.

The scientists were also surprised to know that this effect was only obvious when observing the near sky.

Benjamin Oppenheimer, one of the researchers at CU Boulder, said, "If we count up the known sources of ultraviolet ionizing photons, we come up five times too short. We are missing 80 percent of the ionizing photons, and the question is where are they coming from?"

Oppenheimer added that the biggest possibility of the source of the missing light could be an exotic new source, and not quasars or galaxies that are already know to scientists.