Our light pollution problem isn't getting any better. In fact, it's getting worse, and we've already lost one telescope to it.
organization released a paper based on 10 years of data on the night sky. The data wasn’t from satellites—an important point that we’ll get to later—it was from citizen scientists spread around the world.showing that the night sky is getting 10% brighter each year. Each year, more of the sky’s dimmest stars are being drowned out by sky glow from streetlights, traffic lights, and other sources.
If the Globe at Night paper was a rallying cry, other researchers are responding. A pair of researchers have released their own brief paper that acts as a kind of addendum to the Globe at Night paper. They are Fabio Falchi from the Applied Physics Department at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and Salvador Bara, an independent researcher in Spain.
“Part of this discrepancy could be explained by the impossibility of these satellites to detect the blue light, In that paper, the authors agree with Falchi and Bara that we need satellites that can sense the rapidly spreading LED lights. They also point out that we need a better understanding of angular patterns of light emission. They don’t stop there.
It’s not just star-gazing and the natural world that’s paying a price for light pollution. Science is taking a hit, too, as observatories near urban centres have faced the light pollution problem head-on. Take the case of the 100-inchFrom its completion in 1917 up to 1949, it was the largest aperture telescope in the world. But as light pollution increased, it became more and more difficult to perform useful astronomical observations.
Nobody thoughtful would say they want species driven towards extinction and powerful telescopes shuttered while they’re still effective. Nobody thoughtful wants sky-gazing curtailed, either. But one of the main problems in this issue is our prosperity. As lighting becomes cheaper—and LEDs are cheaper—we’re putting up more and more lights and illuminating roads and streets that never needed it before.
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