Astronomers Despair As SpaceX Starlink Train Ruins Observation Of Nearby Galaxies
November 19th, 2019That’s just the first 120 Starlink satellites out of tens of thousands that will go up in next few years.
Via: Fortune:
In the early hours of the morning today, Monday, November 18, two astronomers checked in on their remotely operated telescope in Chile, expecting to see images of distant stars and galaxies. Instead, they saw a train of SpaceX satellites crossing the night sky, a worrying sign of what might be to come for astronomy.
“Here we were, we had a second half of the night observing, and then we kind of just see all of these streaks,” says Cliff Johnson from Northwestern University in Chicago, one of the two astronomers. “We put two and two together and it was like oh yeah, it’s the train of all the Starlink satellites.”
Starlink is SpaceX’s impending mega constellation of up to 42,000 satellites that will beam high-speed internet around the world. SpaceX, along with its competitors such as OneWeb and Amazon, has touted the benefits of bringing the internet to all, including the estimated three billion without internet access.
However, with just 3,000 active satellites orbiting earth today, many astronomers have expressed concerns that this dramatic increase will create many more artificial points of light in the night sky. For a science that relies on dark skies, having multiple satellites constantly visible could pose significant problems.
