Understanding the Causes of Light Pollution and the Disappearance of Stars: Insights from NOIRLab NSF Study

KOMPAS.com – Light pollution causes the stars in the night sky to disappear quickly. What causes it?

The stars disappear due to light pollution, as revealed by the results of the Globe at Night study conducted by NOIRLab NSF, which is a scientific program for society.

In a study published in the journal Science titled ‘Citizen scientists report global rapid reductions in the visibility of stars from 2011 to 2022’ In this year, researchers investigated how skylight changed around the world from 2011 to 2022.

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Light pollution and loss of starlight

Quoted from Science Daily, Friday (25/08/2023), this study gathered around 51,351 respondents who were interested in star science and they were asked to report what they could see with the naked eye.

The survey from this research highlights the problem of ‘sky glow’ which is actually a form of light pollution.

From the data found, it turns out that the number of stars that can be seen decreases as the sky light increases by about 7-10 percent every year within the reach of the human eye.

Researchers also attributed this difference to changes in the color of the light emitted and the angle from which it came.

In addition, the sky glow is increasing faster than can be measured by satellite measurements of the brightness of the Earth’s surface at night.

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“At this rate of change, a child born in a location where 250 stars can be seen, at the age of 18 will only be able to see 100 stars,” said Christopher Kyba, researcher at the German Research Center for Geosciences and lead author of the paper. .

The study, which has been published in the journal Science, found that artificial light darkens the night sky more quickly than satellite measurements indicate.

Air pollution contribution

Meanwhile, in a previous study published in the journal Science in 2016, titled The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightnessshowing how air pollution contributes to amplifying the impact of light pollution on starlight in the night sky.

The researchers revealed that more than 80 percent of the world’s population and more than a third of the global population cannot see the Milky Way Galaxy due to the effects of light pollution.

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This indicates that the stars in the city sky are indeed disappearing because the artificial light is too bright.

Many artificial rays are emitted into the sky and then scattered by aerosols and pollutant particles in the atmosphere. The result is the “skyglow” phenomenon.

Light pollution is also amplified by other types of air pollution, such as smoke and dust, as these types of pollution can scatter light in all different directions and brighten the sky further.

This is the source of light pollution, where the brightness overpowers the dimness of celestial bodies, so that these objects are difficult to see from the human eye.

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2023-08-26 08:03:00
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