Satellite pollution threatens the night sky view

Although the night sky has been a source of information for the entire world and it looks almost the same now as it did then. But, the sky we once knew is now on the verge of changing dramatically due to the proliferation of satellites just a few hundred miles above Earth.

“For the first time in human history, we’re not going to have access to the night sky in the way that we’ve seen it,” said Samantha Lawler, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Regina in Canada.

Lawler has been watching from her farm in Saskatchewan, Canada, as the number of active satellites has multiplied from about a thousand in 2017 to more than 5,000 today. 

“This is a lot worse than I expected. It’s changing fast,” Lawler said.

And it’s about to get much worse. Lawler and two other Canadian astronomers published a paper in December in The Astronomical Journal which predicted that, in less than a decade, 1 out of every 15 points of light in the night sky will actually be a moving satellite.

“Think about that. There are only about 4,000 stars that you can see with your naked eye and if 200 of those are moving, that is very different than the sky that we’re used to now,” Lawler said. 

The satellites are even more disruptive when viewed through a telescope, and they’re already contaminating images of the cosmos captured by observatories all over the world. Unless something changes dramatically in terms of international regulation of satellite numbers, reflectivity and broadcasting, experts like Lawler believe that impact on astronomical research will intensify.

“It’s kind of like we’re going through this transition (similar to) when the first cars were on the roads. A Model T would drive up the road and you’d run out to go look at it,” Lawler said. “But now you live next to a giant freeway, full of cars. So that’s kind of the transition that we’re going through with satellites in the night sky right now.”

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