Oh Great, Gen 2 Starlink Satellites Are Ruining Astronomy
Oh Great, Gen 2 Starlink Satellites Are Ruining Astronomy
Possibly, but sadly, it's too little, too late.
Starlink is meant to be the internet of the future, but its record is far from unblemished. Elon Musk has used Starlink to meddle with geopolitics and attempt to circumnavigate the law, all for the purpose of justifying his sprawling rocket business. Many customers are furious, as Starlink internet speeds have been on the decline for well over a year now, and yet prices have still gone up in several regions. And, as it turns out, Starlink is ruining one of the most exciting fields of science: astronomy.
This revelation comes from a recent paper from the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON). This paper details how ASTRON’s LOFAR radio telescope found enormous amounts of unintended electromagnetic radiation (UEMR) leaking from Starlink’s second-generation satellites, which SpaceX began rolling out late last year.
Starlink had already come under heavy fire from visual and amateur astronomers due to the first generation of satellites reflecting a large amount of sunlight, leading to light streaks across images, which ruined observation and data collection. The second-generation satellites have attempted to solve this, though it is still a problem. But this study found that they actually emit 32 times the unintended radio waves as the first generation!
Not only that, but these leaking radio waves are in the 110 to 188 megahertz range, a bandwidth that is protected for radio astronomy uses.
To give a sense of scale as to how “bright” these leaking radio waves are, one of the authors of the paper stated, “Compared to the faintest astrophysical sources that we observe with LOFAR, UEMR from Starlink satellites is 10 million times brighter.” In other words, if you could see radio waves with about the same sensitivity as the visual spectrum, each second-generation Starlink satellite would appear as bright as a full Moon in the night sky!
So, why is this a problem?
Well, radio astronomy is one of the most innovative and productive branches of astronomy. Many extreme objects in the universe, such as black holes, distant galaxies, or quasars, are invisible, dim, or nondescript in the visual or infrared spectrum but glow brightly and provide a tonne of data in the radio spectrum. As such, for well over 60 years, radio astronomy has been at the forefront of astronomy, helping us pick apart and understand the universe in unprecedented detail. In fact, almost all the world’s largest radio telescopes recently joined together to form the Event Horizon Telescope array and were able to take the first-ever image of a black hole!
But here is the issue. A Starlink satellite has a lifespan of only five years, and Musk wants to grow the satellite constellation from the 6,350 currently in orbit to 42,000 in a few years’ time. As such, the night sky could soon be utterly stuffed with these second-generation satellites, and radio astronomy will become a thing of the past.
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