Starry sky One in fifteen of the sky’s light points will soon be artificial – thousands of satellites will spoil the view of the real starry sky, as will urban light pollution.

Space company Last week, SpaceX again sent a bundle of satellites to orbit the Earth.

On Thursday, 48 satellites from the United States rose to the sky at one time.

Thus, the number of satellites orbiting the Earth increased again as a surge. SpaceX has already launched more than 1,600 satellites into the Earth’s shallow orbits by the end of the 2010s.

Satellites provide high speed internet to remote areas.

In the night sky, these satellites are not dark. Their surface is often aluminum, which reflects the light of the Sun. The reflection varies depending on the position of the satellite.

The reflection is so bright in places that many viewers of the sky can be confused. He thinks of a satellite as a star flight, a star, a planet or a UFO, for example.

Satellites are part of space Starlink network, for which space company SpaceX is planning as many as 30,000 satellites.

That number of satellites is huge by all measures.

As far back as the early 2000s, only 726 operational satellites orbited the Earth. The first “artificial month” was Sputnik on October 1, 1957. It began space-time.

Last year, 3,368 operational satellites orbited the Earth, he says website Statista. In addition, for more than 60 years, another Mokoma, or nearly 3,000 satellites, have remained in orbit and are now space debris.

They no longer serve humanity. There are an estimated 36,000 larger classified space debris. Some of the scrap also reflects light.

Satellites increasingly confusing the view of distant and authentic objects in the sky. Man has seen them with slightly different clues for thousands and thousands of years.

This is evidenced by the constellations ’own names in all ancient cultures. The nearby destinations of the night sky, the planets, have also been discovered by different nations on their own.

One can see with the naked eye from the night sky about 4,500 natural objects, mostly stars and planets, sometimes asteroids and comets, as well as part of the spiral branch of the Milky Way, for example.

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Like the United States, China is developing its own satellite network.

SpaceX increase the number of satellites to more than 12,000 by the mid-2020s. But it is not the only one that creates obstacles to the prospects for nature.

The British space company OneWeb is also aiming for space with satellites. It has already sent about half of the 648 satellites it takes to the sky at various altitudes.

And that’s not all. Network and space company Amazon also has its own project, Kuiper. It will target more than 3,000 satellites in the coming years. Like the United States, China is developing its own satellite network. There are about 13,000 satellites planned.

A lot there is no need to land on it when you realize that the view of the night sky will change drastically in the next few years.

There is a proven amount of space in space, but you can soon talk about congestion. Or at least more than light pollution.

Electric lights in cities and roads have already shrunk places where the starry sky can be seen without the interference of artificial light.

By astronomers, astronomers mean that there are fewer and fewer regions in the world where the starry sky can be seen as genuine. So without a glimpse of any other light.

However, light pollution can escape to the countryside and wilderness. It has been calculated that in a typical suburb, for example, there are still about 400 stars.

Astronomer Samantha Lawler has modeled what the sky will look like if the plans of different satellite companies come true.

He used values ​​measured from Starlink satellites as a model. Lawler is an Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, Canada.

Astronomical Journal The Astronomical Journal will soon publish Lawler’s models with explanations. Work the draft can already be read from the arXiv online service.

His model predicts the brightness of satellites in different places on the earth, at different times and at different times of the year.

In the model a total of 65,000 satellites designed for orbit by the four major players in the industry have been taken into account. They are US SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Kuiper, Britain’s OneWeb and China’s StarNet / GW.

Lawler says in The Conversation online magazine that if the number of satellites is not regulated, there is in the sky soon one object out of 15 artificial.

Lawler calculates that on the outskirts of the 50th latitude of the northern hemisphere, it is most difficult to see the true starry sky. The view is affected by sunlight, the angle of the earth and the selected orbits of the satellites.

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New light pollution cannot escape even at the North Pole.

In London latitudes, for example, hundreds of Starlink satellites are visible a few hours immediately after sunset and before sunrise.

In addition to London, nasty places include Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Kiev, Vancouver and Calgary and its environs.

During the summer months, dozens of satellites flicker through the summer night. In mid-summer, or during the summer solstice, those latitudes are visible to the naked eye for nearly 200 satellites through the night.

According to the modeling, dozens or hundreds of satellites are visible all over the world in all seasons, when it is early in the morning or late in the evening.

Helsinki is slightly north of this satellite congestion zone, at 60 degrees latitude, as is the rest of Finland.

However, modeling shows that new light pollution cannot escape even at the North Pole.

Starlink the satellites are bright. They shine brighter than 99 percent of all satellites. One reason is that they orbit the Earth on low orbits that is, at an altitude of about 200 to 800 kilometers.

Thus they are closer to the surface of the Earth. They also reflect light more than Starlink engineers predicted.

Most can be seen with the naked eye, although Starlink has been able to dim some of the satellites after transmission.

So if you see a bright object moving in the sky, then it is quite certainly a Starlink satellite.

SpaceX is currently sending satellites into space every few weeks. Starlink plans to replace its satellite after five years of use. Lawler calculates that it will ultimately mean about 25 satellite changes per day.

Read more: In addition to space debris, there is now light pollution in Earth’s orbit – There are two problems to be solved in our near space

Astronomers of course, are developing ways to circumvent the light interference from satellites. However, they usually eat up our taxpayers ’money and take time and effort.

International Astronomical Federation The IAU was nervous about the new satellites as early as 2019. The use of the earth’s low orbits when barely regulated. In 1967, the UN Convention on Space was signed. One of its principles is that space should be exploited.

The United States has granted space X permits to place satellites. China will probably do the same. States cannot influence the permits of other countries.

Lie reflections from orbiting satellites have already increased the brightness of the night sky by ten percent.

Satellites make it difficult to observe and describe thousands and thousands of objects in the starry sky. Their radio frequencies also interfere with radio astronomy.

The scariest thing, however, Lawler thinks is that we could lose the traditional night sky all over the world.

So, who wouldn’t have ever looked longingly at the stars, alone or in good company.

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