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.
Shiny Satellites, Space Junk Blocking Our View of the Universe: Study
The study is the first to examine the overall effect of space objects on the night sky. By Edited by Gadgets 360 Newsdesk | Updated: 3 May 2021 12:18 IST
Photo Credit: Royal Astronomical Society/ Andreas Möller
Trails caused by the fifth deployment of satellites making up the Starlink constellation
Highlights
Mega-constellations include satellites such as ones launched by Starlink
Companies such as Amazon and OneWeb, too, plan to launch their satellites
Shiny satellites and space junk orbiting Earth may have increased the brightness of the night sky by more than 10 percent above the natural light levels, a new study has found, and further stated that these objects in the sky could also pose a threat to our viewing of the universe. The research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a scientific journal, is the first to examine the overall effe
Miroslava Sawiris is a Research Fellow for Democracy and Resilience at the GLOBSEC Policy Institute.
Despite significant efforts exerted by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and propaganda theatre of political leaders ‘welcoming’ batches of the so far EMA-unapproved Sputnik V, only 5% of populations living in 10 Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) would opt to get vaccinated by Sputnik V over other vaccines approved by EMA, according to the latest representative public opinion polling by GLOBSEC.
The only outlier is Slovakia, where the percentage reaches 15%. However, even here, despite the massive discussion of the Russian vaccine dominating public discourse for a couple of months, 42% of the population would still pick Western vaccine or any EMA-approved vaccine over Sputnik V.
autoevolution 29 Apr 2021, 15:40 UTC ·
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At the time of this writing, SpaceX just deployed an additional 60 Starlink satellites. They will join the others up there in orbit in the hopes of making Elon Musk the god of satellite internet access, as the science community is growing angrier with all the junk we keep sending up there. 1 photo
For a while now, scientists who look at the sky for a living have been crying that the glow caused by orbiting satellites and other types of space junk interferes with Earth-based instruments used to search the depths of space.
If there was any need for proof to support that claim, just remember how in the summer of last year, a Canary Islands-based photographer came up with a very peculiar shot of the Neowise comet on account of the Starlink satellites.
The Slovak director of the Chinese Confucius Institute in Bratislava, Ľuboslav Štora, sent threatening mail to Matej Šimalčík, one of the key experts on China in CEE countries and the executive director of the Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS). It reads: “Are you sleeping well? You should be under a lot of stress when you’re walking down the street…”
The director, the former head of the Slovak branch of ZTE, sent the threat shortly after a CEIAS survey exposing the Chinese presence at Slovak universities had been published.
There are three Confucius Institutes in Slovakia, the one in Bratislava was founded upon the agreement with the Slovak University of Technology (STU), and also has the largest number of projects and cooperation with China and Chinese companies.