A new satellite launched into space shines brighter than almost all visible stars in the night sky, warns a study published in the journal Nature earlier this week and cited by Insider.

The team of researchers from the International Astronomical Union, which published the study, notes that the satellite, called “BlueWalker 3”, now shines brighter at night than any other celestial object except the 7 stars, the moon and the planets Jupiter and Venus.

The satellite was launched last September by US telecommunications company AST SpaceMobile in collaboration with Vodafone, AT&T and Nokia, offering 5G connectivity between mobile phones on the ground from space.

The first observations of the satellite since its launch showed that its antenna shines brighter than most stars visible at night, now confirmed by a year-long observing campaign that used telescopes in the United States, Chile, the Netherlands and New Zealand. , reports New Scientist magazine.

Astronomers actually found that BlueWalker 3 is brighter than initial measurements suggested.

Patrick Seitzer, an astronomer at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor, told Nature that “the night sky will be irreparably changed” if the current trend of launching more and more satellites into space continues.

But this is far from the first time when astronomers sound the alarm that networks of satellites launched into space complicate and even endanger observation from the ground.

There is growing concern about satellites launched into space

Another study published in the journal Nature Astronomy this spring, which focused on observations made by the Hubble telescope, pointed to the fact that even space telescopes are increasingly challenged by satellites.

“We will have to live with this problem. And astronomy will suffer. There will be science that cannot be done. There will be science, which will be much more expensive to do. There will be things we will miss,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the study, told the New York Times at the time.

The problem is that satellites fall into Hubble’s field of view when it takes pictures, compromising them. Researchers show that between 2009 and 2020, the probability of a satellite appearing in a Hubble image was 3.7%. But in 2021, in just one year, it suddenly increased to 5.9%. Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite Internet network was identified as the culprit.

The researchers completed their observations two years ago, but only published the results in early March with a large amount of data to analyze. Meanwhile, the number of satellites launched by SpaceX has increased by more than 100% to more than 3,500.

Once Musk was asked about the problem and he suggested that telescopes simply move into space.

Of course, SpaceX is not the only one creating this situation, but it is certainly the company with the most satellites in orbit. And in the case of the Hubble Space Telescope, it is already in space. The authors of the March study estimated that by 2030 the number of satellites orbiting our planet could grow to 100,000, and SpaceX alone wants to reach 42,000.

As for AST SpaceMobile, the company that launched the BlueWalker 3 satellite, it told Nature that it is working with NASA and groups of astronomers to mitigate concerns raised in the new study.