Astronomers have known about the zodiacal dust cloud for more than 300 years, since Giovanni Domenico Cassini drew attention to the phenomenon of the zodiacal light and gave the correct explanation for it as sunlight reflected from small grains of dust. Early space missions began studying the distribution of this dust in the 1960s. In 1983, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite detected infrared emission from the zodiacal dust.
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