Astronomy

The number of satellites in orbit around Earth is rapidly increasing, with some 100,000 expected to be in place by 2030. And as their numbers grow, so does the difficulty of observing the universe from Earth.

Starlink’s satellites are bright enough that astronomers have decried them as an existential threat for as long as SpaceX has been launching them into orbit. While the company has taken some measures to mitigate how shiny they appear from Earth, their increased number and the many other satellites being launched means that their light pollution is “threatening the entirety of ground-based astronomy in every wavelength and in different ways,” astronomers told the BBC. There is a fear that soon, space observation might begin to look like a “windshield of bugs,” and become unfeasible, a researcher at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile told The New York Times.

So basically, at least during the rest of this decade, our billion dollar telescopes, radio and optical, are blind on different frequencies or are only able to obtain diffuse resolution.