Manmade Satellites Cause Light Pollution in Night Sky, Study Finds
Those days may be behind us now.
Satellite companies are rushing to launch small satellites into low orbits of Earth to provide fast internet access to remote places. These satellites form artificial mega-constellations that are quickly changing the night sky.
For instance, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has launched around 1,300 small satellites into space as part of its Starlink internet service, and SpaceX has already gotten permission to launch 12,000 of them. Now, even in the darkest places on Earth, the night sky is contaminated by the trajectories of these small satellites, which can sometimes be seen with the naked eye.
May 6, 2021
Artist s impression of a yellow supergiant in a close binary with a blue, main sequence companion star. Credit: Kavli IPMU/Aya Tsuboi.
A curiously yellow pre-supernova star has caused astrophysicists to re-evaluate what is possible at the deaths of our Universe’s most massive stars.
The team describe the peculiar star and its resulting supernova in a new study published today in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
At the end of their lives, cool, yellow stars are typically shrouded in hydrogen, which conceals the star’s hot, blue interior.
But this yellow star, located 35 million light years from Earth in the Virgo galaxy cluster, was mysteriously lacking this crucial hydrogen layer at the time of its explosion.
Researchers used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to examine the massive star two-and-a-half years before it exploded into a supernova, discovering that it lacked hydrogen.
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IMAGE: Artist s impression of a yellow supergiant in a close binary with a blue, main sequence companion star, similar to the properties derived for the 2019yvr progenitor system in Kilpatrick et. view more
Credit: Kavli IPMU / Aya Tsuboi
A curiously yellow pre-supernova star has caused astrophysicists to re-evaluate what s possible at the deaths of our Universe s most massive stars. The team describe the peculiar star and its resulting supernova in a new study published today in
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
At the end of their lives, cool, yellow stars are typically shrouded in hydrogen, which conceals the star s hot, blue interior. But this yellow star, located 35 million light years from Earth in the Virgo galaxy cluster, was mysteriously lacking this crucial hydrogen layer at the time of its explosion.