A string of lights that lobbed across the night sky in parts of the US on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday had some people wondering if a fleet of UFOs was coming, but it had others — mostly amateur stargazers and professional astronomers — lamenting the industrialization of space.
The train of lights was actually a series of relatively low-flying satellites launched by Elon Musk’s SpaceX as part of its Starlink Internet service earlier last week. Callers swamped TV stations from Texas to Wisconsin reporting the lights and musing about UFOs.
An e-mail to a spokesman for SpaceX was not returned on Saturday, but astronomy experts said the number of lights in quick succession and their distance from Earth made them easily identifiable as Starlink satellites for those who are used to seeing them.
“The way you can tell they are Starlink satellites is they are like a string of pearls, these lights travelling in the same basic orbit, one right after the other,” American Astronomical Society press officer Richard Fienberg said.
Fienberg said the satellites that are being launched in large groups called constellations string together when they orbit, especially right after launching.
The strings get smaller as time goes on.
SpaceX has already launched dozens of satellites this month.
It is part of a plan to bridge the digital divide and bring Internet access to underserved areas of the world, with SpaceX tentatively scheduled to launch another 120 satellites later in the month.
Overall, the company has sent about 1,500 satellites into orbit and has asked for permission to launch thousands more.
Fienberg’s group as well as others that represent professional and amateur stargazers do not love the proliferation of satellites that can obscure scientific data and ruin a clear night of watching the universe.
The International Astronomical Union in July 2019 issued a statement noting concern about the multiple satellite launches.
“The organisation, in general, embraces the principle of a dark and radio-quiet sky as not only essential to advancing our understanding of the universe of which we are a part, but also as a resource for all humanity and for the protection of nocturnal wildlife,” the union’s representatives wrote.
They said that light reflection can interfere with astronomical research, but the radio waves can also cause problems for specialized research equipment such as those that captured the first images of a black hole.
Fienberg said there is no real regulation of light pollution from satellites, but SpaceX has voluntarily worked to mitigate that by creating visors that dampen the satellites’ reflection of sunlight.
They have made significant progress in just two years, he said, but many hope that the satellites would some day be at such a low magnitude that they would not be visible to the naked eye even at dusk or dawn.
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