Elon Musk is releasing thousands of satellites that cause photobombardment on Hubble, the most important space telescope for the investigation of the universe until James Webb went into action. This causes long bright streaks and curves of light in your photos that are impossible to remove.
And the problem only gets worse, since it is not only Starlink of Elon MuskThere are dozens of private companies. A study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Astronomy, reveals an increase in the percentage of images recorded by Hubble that are damaged by the passage of satellites.
And the data goes only up to 2021. Thousands more satellites have since been launched by SpaceX and other companies, and many more are expected to go into orbit in the coming years, affecting Hubble and potentially other telescopes in space.
“There will be science that cannot be done. There will be science that will be much more expensive to do. There will be things that we will misssays Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
This jeopardizes tools like the Hubble telescope, thanks to which we now know that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, that most galaxies contain a supermassive black hole at their center, and that stars form in violent processes.
Satellites in space will not stop increasing in the next decade
The number of satellites in orbit has increased considerably since the launch of Hubble in 1990, and everything indicates that in the future this scenario will only worsen year after year.
In May 2019, SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites., designed to provide Internet coverage to the entire planet. Soon after, an outcry arose among astronomers, concerned that Starlink’s streaks would endanger observation of the universe from Earth.
In response, Elon Muskfounder and CEO of SpaceX, suggested that astronomers avoid the problem by moving telescopes into orbit. Because Elon Musk is like that, a visionary, there are no problems, only solutions (you can notice sarcasm here).
But Hubble, which lives in low Earth orbit about 150 km above Earth’s surface, is being torpedoed by Starlink satellites. That means the observatory and other orbiting space telescopes continue to face such interference. Now where do we take the telescopes, huh Elon Musk?