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Observation of beautiful celestial bodies shining in the night sky is obstructed by numerous artificial satellites, a study has found. In particular, astronomers put Space X, which is promoting the ‘Starlink’ plan, on a cutting board at the center of it.
Recently, a joint research team, including the University of Warsaw, Poland, published a study result in the latest issue of ‘The Astrophysical Journal Letters’ that showed that too many SpaceX satellites are clustering and are impeding astronomical observations during twilight hours.
Starlink of SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, is a grand idea to build a space internet network. SpaceX plans to launch a total of 12,000 satellites to realize the space Internet concept that covers all the Internet blind spots in the global village. In fact, so far, SpaceX has placed about 1,800 satellites in Earth orbit, and about 10,000 are still scheduled to go into space.
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The problem is that so many satellites interfere with the observation of the night sky, which was also proven in this paper. The research team analyzed images of the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), a wide-area astronomical survey equipment at the Paloma Observatory located in California, USA from November 2019 to September 2021. As a result, a whopping 5301 lines created by Starlink satellites were confirmed. This effect was particularly evident before sunrise or after sunset.
“The impact from Starlink satellites was less than 0.5% in the second half of 2019, but increased to nearly 20% in August of last year,” said Dr. “If it’s on orbit, there’s a chance that every image will have at least one light trail.”
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The concerns of the astronomy community due to the large number of satellites are not, in fact, a thing of the past. In the past, such criticisms continued mainly from the domestic and foreign astronomical circles, and SpaceX also test-fired DarkSat coated with a black paint that lowers the reflectivity of Starlink and VisorSat equipped with an anti-reflection panel. .
However, the number of satellites orbiting the Earth is expected to increase exponentially in the future. Amazon, the IT giant, also plans to build a network with more than 3,000 satellites to provide high-speed internet to the world. For this reason, some predict that by 2029 there will be as many as 57,000 or even 100,000 artificial satellites orbiting the Earth.
By Park Jong-ik, staff reporter pji@seoul.co.kr
