![]() ![]() The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has called for measures to be taken, as they will “saturate the modern detectors large telescopes,” and the Spanish Astronomical Society considers them “a threat to astronomical observation.” So much so, that they have taken their complaint to the United Nations, and the commission for space affairs is studying how to put a stop to it. In recent times, observatories have expressed great concern regarding the mega-constellations of satellites that Starlink and other companies, like OneWeb or Amazon, are deploying in the skies. Today, they are close to 3,600, and the number is expected to multiply by 10 – and to reach 100,000 in total, counting those deployed by the competition – by the end of this decade. That same year (when the study’s last measurement was taken) Starlink had deployed about 1,900 satellites. In 2021, 5.9% of the images captured by the legendary Hubble telescope suffered from this photobombing caused by these artifacts’ trails. The swarms of devices were already a problem for ground-based observatories, but a recent study found that they also ruin observations from space telescopes, something that is raising concern among astronomers. But all those astronomical observations, that have been spoiled for science, actually reveal a problem: how the skies are being increasingly filled with artificial satellites from internet companies like Elon Musk’s Starlink. At first glance, one may assume that the images were damaged by a technical glitch: distant galaxies with streaks that cut through them, blank stripes that cover half the picture, lines that dirty entire constellations. ![]()
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