Astronomers fear the bright satellites will disturb research, hinder our view of stars
When SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by Elon Musk, launched the first batch of Starlink orbiters in May, many astronomers were surprised to see the satellites were extremely bright, causing them to fear that the constellation would wreak havoc on scientific research and transform our view of the stars.
Since then, many scientists have been on a mission to better quantify the impacts of Starlink and to share their concerns with SpaceX.
In response, SpaceX has said it wants to mitigate the potential impacts of Starlink. But at the same time, the company is moving full steam ahead.
In October, Musk announced he was using Twitter via a Starlink internet connection, as his company was requesting permission from the Federal Communications Commission to operate as many as 30,000 satellites on top of the 12,000 already approved.
Should SpaceX succeed in sending this many satellites to low Earth orbit, its constellation would contain more than
eight times as many satellites as the total number currently in orbit.
That move added to the worries of many astronomers.
When James Lowenthal, an astronomer at Smith College, first saw the train of Starlink satellites marching like false stars across the night sky in the spring, he knew something had shifted.
“I felt as if life as an astronomer and a lover of the night sky would never be the same,” he said.
Most of the first Starlink nodes since have moved to higher orbits and now are invisible for most of us who live under bright city lights. But they still are noticeable from places with dark skies. If thousands more of these satellites are launched, Lowenthal said he feared “it will look as if the whole sky is crawling with stars.”
Since May, the American Astronomical Society has convened an ad hoc committee with Lowenthal and other experts to discuss their concerns with SpaceX representatives once a month.
At the same time, SpaceX has been working directly with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a federally funded research center that operates facilities across the world, to jointly minimize potential impacts of Starlink satellites on radio wavelengths that astronomers use.
But these conversations didn’t focus on light pollution, a problem presented by the reflective surfaces of proposed satellite constellations such as Starlink. At first, SpaceX said the complication would be minimal, and the new committee is trying to assess the impact and actively find solutions.
“So far, they’ve been quite open and generous with their data,” Lowenthal said. “But they have not made any promises.”
A spokeswoman from SpaceX said the company was taking steps to paint the Earth-facing bases of the satellites black to reduce their reflectiveness. But Anthony Tyson, an astronomer at the University of California at Davis, said that wouldn’t solve the problem.
Tyson is the chief scientist for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope — a 27-foot, billion-dollar telescope under construction in Chile that will scan the entire sky every three days.
The survey, the world’s largest yet, will help astronomers better understand dark energy, dark matter, the origin of the Milky Way and the outer regions of the solar system. But because it’s designed to scan faint objects, it is expected to be greatly affected by the satellites.
Tyson’s simulations showed the telescope would pick up Starlink-like objects even if they were darkened. And they wouldn’t just affect a single pixel in a photograph. When there is a single bright object in the image, it can create fainter artifacts as well because of internal reflections within the telescope’s detector.
Moreover, whenever a satellite photobombs a long-exposure image, it causes a bright streak of light that can cross directly in front of an object astronomers wish to observe.
“It’s really a mess,” Tyson said. SpaceX’s 30,000 satellites also just might be the start, as other companies — such as Amazon, Telesat and OneWeb — plan to launch similar mega-constellations.
“If there are lots and lots of bright moving objects in the sky, it tremendously complicates our job,” Lowenthal said. “It potentially threatens the science of astronomy itself.”
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who closely tracks objects in orbit, agrees.
“There is a point at which it makes ground-based astronomy impossible to do,” he said. “I’m not saying Starlink is that point. But if you just don’t worry about it and go another 10 years with more and more mega-constellations, eventually you are going to come to a point where you can’t do astronomy anymore. And so let’s talk about it now.”
While astronomers are starting those conversations, they have little legal recourse. There are no regulations in place to protect the sky against light pollution.