Story at a glance:
- Space junk catches sunlight and reflects it back down to earth.
- This is causing the sky to be noticeably brighter and making it harder to study space.
- The effect is similar to light pollution on Earth caused by artificial light sources.
Light pollution isn’t just a problem here on Earth anymore. Scientists are now finding that space debris orbiting around our planet is noticeably brightening the sky — and making it more difficult to study the cosmos.
Old fragments of satellites, rockets and disregarded garbage are reflective space junk, and the sunlight shining on these items increases the brightness of the night sky, Futurism reported.
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Naturally, it is harder to conduct research due to the reflectiveness of shiny trash, and communication through satellite radio gets interrupted. Astronomers have long been concerned about space junk, scientists write, which creates a much more dangerous environment for other satellites in orbit.
“Since there are objects orbiting the Earth in all manner of orbital inclinations, really nowhere is safe from this,” John Barentine, public policy director at the International Dark-Sky Association and co-author of the study, told The Washington Post.
The brighter skies — often thought of as just caused by artificial light on Earth — also throw off millions of birds migrating through the U.S. to spring breeding grounds, according to an interview with Executive Director Ruskin Hartley of the International Dark-Sky Association with Yahoo! News.
“Those massive light dumps from those cities essentially draw those birds off their migratory track, off their historic migration track,” Hartley said.
Hartley also said that light pollution, or artificial light, can cause people to develop diseases from obesity, diabetes, all the way through cancer because the excess of artificial light could increase the risk of sleep disorders and weaken people’s immune system dependent on sleep to fight against illness, as well as create other medical complications.
Christopher Kyba, a light pollution expert at The German Research Center for Geosciences, told The Post that he expects engineers will somehow remove the space debris from orbit in the coming years.
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