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CBC
10 hours ago
- Science
- CBC
Under attack: How humanity is losing the night sky
Losing the dark isn't just about the stars. It has dire consequences for human health as well as the natural world. Your browser does not support the video tag. Pause By Nicole Mortillaro Jun. 21, 2025 Nestled atop Cerro Paranal, a 2,600-metre mountain in the Atacama desert in Chile, sits the Very Large Telescope. It's not really a single telescope, as the name suggests, but four giant eyes on the sky housed in silver metallic domes. The surrounding area is nothing but mountains and hills — and a few other telescopes. The nearest small town is 40 kilometres away. The air is still. It is rarely cloudy, and when it gets dark, the Milky Way, so dense with stars, casts shadows of the giant silver structures across the dusty landscape. 'It's majestic. And it's humbling,' said Ruskin Hartley, CEO and executive director of DarkSky International, a non-profit organization that advocates for dark skies. ADVERTISEMENT 'It gives you a real sense … of the scale of the natural world and the universe, and we're just a tiny part of it.' A night sky as pristine as this is rare and becoming rarer thanks to light pollution. But even if one were to get away from light pollution and stare up at the stars — which have guided humanity from its earliest beginnings, influencing science, art, faith and wonder — they would still be inundated with satellites invariably intruding on the view. And the loss of the night sky isn't just a disconnect from these past influences. It also has dire consequences for humans and wildlife alike. Roughly 20 kilometres from the Very Large Telescope (VLT), another far larger telescope is under construction: the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). It will house a 39-metre mirror that will be used to peer deep into the cosmos and take images of distant planetary systems and potentially habitable planets, among other things. This region of Chile is one of the darkest, most still places on Earth. It's the very reason why the European Southern Observatory (ESO) chose the location to build its telescopes. But this pristine environment is under threat. Last December, AES Andes, a subsidiary of the U.S. energy company the AES Corporation, submitted an environmental impact assessment for a large industrial project. The 3,000-hectare energy megaproject would consist of ammonia and hydrogen production plants, along with a solar plant and a wind farm. In its construction phase, there would be thousands of people onsite. Once completed, there would be hundreds of people involved in its 24-hour-a-day operations, said Itziar de Gregorio-Monsalvo, ESO's head of the office for science. Basically, it would be similar to a small city. And small cities have lights. Lots of them. And it would be just 11 kilometres from the VLT and 20 kilometres from the ELT. That exquisite dark sky would become tainted with light pollution, brightening the sky and threatening the science operations of some of the most important telescopes in the world. 'It's going to be devastating,' said de Gregorio-Monsalvo. 'Basically, we will not be able to observe as a professional observatory anymore. I want to emphasize that we selected [this] place because of the condition of the atmosphere and of the darkness.' Closing the observatories would be no small consequence. The VLT has been contributing to astronomical discoveries since it began operations in 1998. It was the first telescope to take an image of an exoplanet in 2004 and helped confirm the existence of a black hole at the centre of our galaxy. The authors of the paper describing the discovery received a Nobel Prize in 2020. Your browser does not support the video tag. Pause The AES environmental assessment report found that the industrial project would increase light pollution above the VLT by at least 35 per cent. And that would severely impact its ability to detect Earth-like exoplanets and distant galaxies or even the detection of minor asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. 'I am quite concerned,' de Gregorio-Monsalvo said. 'I think it's quite easy to protect these areas for doing astronomy because they are windows to the universe.' She does make it clear, however, that the ESO isn't opposed to the green energy project in and of itself. 'We really support these green energy projects." Your browser does not support the video tag. Pause But, she added: 'We know Chile is long enough … and [moving it] between 50 or 100 kilometres away would be enough for not impacting our observatories.' And she noted that more and more telescopes around the world face the threat of light pollution, mostly from nearby expanding towns and cities. But light pollution is not only threatening important scientific discoveries. It's also diminishing the human connection with the stars. Sky grief It's Aug. 14, 2003, shortly after 4 p.m., and Todd Carlson is lying on his sofa in Goodwood, Ont., about 60 kilometres northeast of Toronto, when the power goes out. At first, he doesn't think much of it. Maybe it's a local transformer issue. But then something occurs to him. What if this lasts into the night? 'Ten seconds later, it hit me: this could be good for the selfish astronomy guy,' he said. The sky was clear, the atmosphere was stable and the lights were out. It was an astronomer's dream. The power didn't come back any time soon. Instead, it was knocked out in parts of Ontario and the U.S. northeast and Midwest for hours. In some places, the blackout lasted two days. While cities like Toronto, New York and Cleveland were bogged down in traffic congestion and chaos, Carlson was in his element. A night of observing without light pollution? Could there be anything better? Then he had a thought. 'I should take a photo of this. I really should, because straight to the southwest was the Milky Way,' he said. So he did. And when the power came on the next day, he decided to take a photo of what it's like on any ordinary day, just for comparison. Those two photos became a rallying cry around the world of what we've lost: the stars and the wonder of the night sky. In 2023, the Smithsonian included them in its ' Lights Out: Recovering our Night Sky ' exhibit that runs until the end of December. Now, 22 years later, light pollution has become even worse. 'We have lost something that makes us human, something that makes us deeply human, that beautiful stew of being curious and holding awe and mystery and creativity and gratitude,' said Aparna Venkatesan, an astronomer in the department of physics and astronomy at the University of San Francisco. 'It's not just human. It's very humanizing.' The night sky has influenced humanity from its earliest beginnings. It helped us navigate; it was used for time-keeping and agricultural practices; it inspired wonder and curiosity; it roused writers and artists; and it created mythologies and religions. Mehrnoosh Tahani, an astrophysicist and a Banting Fellow at Stanford University in California, started the Open Cultural Astronomy Forum, which offers seminars on the subject. 'I was actually surprised when I started cultural astronomy … I was surprised how many people joined the seminars,' she said. 'I think teaching it is very important, not only in terms of diversifying the field of astronomy, but also trying to figure out how we got here, how we have the knowledge that we have today.' She said the seminars have included astronomical lore from eastern Nigeria to Indigenous communities in Australia and Canada. And there's evidence that planispheres — maps of the constellations — were being used as far back as 5,000 years ago by the Sumerians. Humans come from the stars. We are literally made of ' star stuff,' as the late American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan said. Yet, the Milky Way — with its billions and billions of stars — is invisible to most of humanity. In fact, a 2016 study found that the Milky Way is hidden from more than 80 per cent of the world and 99 per cent of North Americans. With this in mind, Venkatesan and astronomer John Barentine wrote a letter to Science magazine in 2023 that appeared in its special edition titled: 'Losing the Darkness.' In it, the pair suggested the term 'noctalgia' to convey 'sky grief' or the loss of the night sky. 'This represents far more than mere loss of environment: we are witnessing loss of heritage, place-based language, identity, storytelling, millennia-old sky traditions and our ability to conduct traditional practices grounded in the ecological integrity of what we call home,' they wrote. But there's also more to it than that. Our bodies evolved in a day/night cycle, called the circadian rhythm. And there's increasing evidence that disrupting that rhythm has consequences. 'More and more we're learning that day/night — that light/dark cycle — is a very fundamental part of the ecology of the world, and [has] fundamental impacts on our life and on our health,' Hartley said. Light pollution Sky brightness Very bright Very dark Sudbury Sudbury Quebec City Quebec City Ottawa Ottawa Montreal Montreal Barrie Barrie Toronto Toronto Buffalo Buffalo Boston Boston Windsor Windsor Cleveland Cleveland New York New York Pittsburg Pittsburgh 100 km Source: (CBC) He also noted that there have been numerous studies showing a higher incidence of many diseases, such as cancer, in those who have experienced artificial light at night (ALAN), such as shift workers. Light pollution also has effects on birds, causing them to crash into buildings, as well as insects, which are facing declines. To be clear, it's not that DarkSky is advocating for no lighting. They want responsible lighting, where light faces down and isn't pouring out and upwards, causing sky glow, or the brightening of the night sky. 'You walk around a city at night and you will see countless unshielded lights, particularly wall packs. They are not making anyone safer. They are the anathema, antithesis, of safety,' Hartley said. 'It's also very common to overlight spaces … to a factor of five or 10. Well, that's pure waste.' Ersatz stars The grassy field is full of tents, RVs, cars and pickup trucks. But more importantly, it's filled with telescopes both large and small as far as the eye can see. This is Starfest, an annual star party for amateur astronomers that is run every August by the North York Astronomical Association in Toronto. Its location has been the same since 1982: in Ayton, Ont., roughly 140 kilometres northwest of Toronto. For some of the 600-plus attendees, this is the one time of year when they escape the light-polluted skies of their homes and camp beneath the Milky Way that stretches overhead. The sun set some time ago, but it's still not dark yet. People are busily assembling their telescopes or checking on their telescope set-ups, some chatting with one another, others silently checking cords and cameras attached to their telescopes, ready to photograph distant galaxies, nebulas or star clusters. Suddenly, a disembodied voice cries out and all eyes are on the sky to the southwest. There, a dozen or so ghostly lights cross the sky, moving from west to east. Everyone here knows exactly what they're looking at. There are no claims of UFOs here. They're looking at a Starlink train of satellites. After about a minute, the strange lights disappear as they enter Earth's shadow. Grumbles about 'stupid' satellites can be heard. Currently, there are more than 11,000 operational satellites in orbit. Of those, more than 6,700 belong to SpaceX's Starlink. But that number changes regularly, with two launches a week putting up dozens more. These groupings of satellites are called constellations, and they're becoming problematic for astronomers. Your browser does not support the video tag. Pause The goal of Starlink is to provide satellite internet capabilities to practically everyone on the planet, no matter how remote the location. In order to achieve that goal, the company requires many satellites for coverage. At one point, it said that it wants to create a 'megaconstellation' of 42,000. When the first Starlinks were launched in May 2019, the astronomical community took notice — quickly. It appeared that no one had actually considered how bright these objects would be in the night sky, particularly in the days before they are raised into their final orbits. The Starlink trains were interfering with professional observatories that now had to deal with streaks of light going through their data. It's not that these lines couldn't be removed, but the community realized that there were going to be thousands of these satellites disrupting their research. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) stepped in and created the Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky from Satellite Constellation Interference (CPS). SpaceX worked with them 'almost from Day 1,' said astronomer and CPS co-director Connie Walker, and it continues to do so, trying to mitigate the reflectivity of its satellites. The company tried a visor and, on two occasions, different paint. While the latest change in paint has dimmed them slightly, newer satellites are bigger, so they are still reflecting a similar amount of light. 'These constellations, they were designed for internet access, and that's a viable thing that is needed around the world,' said Walker. Starlink visualization by Will DePue, 'But it can still obstruct our astronomical observations by creating these bright streaks on images and also interfering with radio telescopes.' But it's not just SpaceX that wants to launch these constellations. There are far more planned by other players, including Amazon's Kuiper constellation (with plans for 3,200), OneWeb (planned 632), and China with a planned 14,000. 'My stomach just drops when I see the satellites,' said Samantha Lawler, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Regina who keeps a close eye on satellites and their orbits. 'It absolutely ruins any enjoyment of the night sky for me.' She noted that from her farm in rural Saskatchewan, she can see dozens of satellites pass overhead at any given time. And that's before the tens of thousands that are planned. 'There's no way we can have that many satellites up there,' she said. 'We will have collisions way before all these companies launch.' The future So, how do you protect a night sky that has already disappeared? Hartley said that when LED lighting came in, cities began to install it as a way of saving money. But LEDs are brighter, and because they're cheaper, cities may be more inclined to put more lighting in areas. But cities — and individuals — can make changes. 'The city of Tucson is a great example. When they did retrofit their street lights here in town, from the start, they decided that they wanted to have their energy savings, and they wanted to limit skyglow,' Hartley said. The city invested in energy-efficient LEDs, with adaptive controls: from sunset to midnight the lights operate at 90 per cent and then, after midnight, the lights are reduced to 60 per cent. 'They wanted … to protect the major observatories around the region. And as a result, they were able to have massive energy savings. They're saving $3 million a year in energy every year, and they reduced sky glow by eight per cent.' And individuals can make wiser choices about the lighting they use around their homes, he added, including using lighting only when needed and having shielded light fixtures that prevent light from dispersing outwards and upwards. There needs to be a will to make the effort, Harley said. But skyglow and the loss of the Milky Way isn't on most people's radars. 'We can only value what we know, and if we don't know some things, how do we advocate?' Venkatesan said. 'It's kind of like pollution and other aspects, right? If we've never known quiet, a space without noise pollution, or we've never known clean water, it's hard to know what that feels like.' But that experience — sitting under a truly dark sky — can be transformative. 'I think going out under a natural dark sky and seeing the Milky Way, and seeing the cosmos and just letting that wash over you is the ultimate experience of longevity,' Hartley said. 'You're looking back into the deepest expanses of time, and … there's a sense of awe that changes people forever.' Though the Milky Way may be something that most of the world's population only sees in photographs, Venkatesan encourages people to travel to dark-sky locations, to sit beneath a sky awash in starlight, to experience what inspired our ancestors, that inspired tales and guided whole civilizations. 'Care about dark skies,' she said. 'Because it's part of being human.' Top video: David Cortner About the Author Related Stories Footer Links My Account Profile CBC Gem Newsletters Connect with CBC Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Mobile RSS Podcasts Contact CBC Submit Feedback Help Centre Audience Relations, CBC P.O. Box 500 Station A Toronto, ON Canada, M5W 1E6 Toll-free (Canada only): 1-866-306-4636 TTY/Teletype writer: 1-866-220-6045 About CBC Corporate Info Sitemap Reuse & Permission Terms of Use Privacy Jobs Our Unions Independent Producers Political Ads Registry AdChoices Services Ombudsman Public Appearances Commercial Services CBC Shop Doing Business with Us Renting Facilities Accessibility It is a priority for CBC to create a website that is accessible to all Canadians including people with visual, hearing, motor and cognitive challenges. Closed Captioning and Described Video is available for many CBC shows offered on CBC Gem. About CBC Accessibility Accessibility Feedback © 2025 CBC/Radio-Canada. All rights reserved. Visitez
New York Times
2 days ago
- Science
- New York Times
The Universe's Darkest Mysteries Are Coming Into Focus
To reach the top of Cerro Pachón, a mountain at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile, astronomers take a drive of two hours up a winding, bumpy road. The lush greenery at the mountain's base slowly gives way to the browns and yellows of the desert. Eventually, telescopes rise in the distance, the sun glinting off their metal domes. The newest eye on the cosmos is the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which houses the largest digital camera ever built. For the next 10 years, the telescope will take advantage of its station under Chilean skies, some of the darkest on Earth, to conduct an astronomical survey more ambitious than any scientific instrument that came before it. From that survey, astronomers hope to learn about the birth of our Milky Way galaxy, the mysterious matter comprising much of the cosmos, and how the universe evolved into its current arrangement. Perhaps they will even uncover clues about its fate. They will also use the telescope to home in on millions of transient objects, 'faint things that go bang, explode or move in the night,' said Tony Tyson, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Davis. That includes gorging black holes and collisions of dense, dead stars. But the most valuable discoveries, astronomers say, lie beyond the reaches of their imagination. 'The universe always throws us surprises,' said Michael Strauss, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. With Rubin, he said, 'we don't yet know what those surprises will be.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
How do baby planets grow? Study of 30 stellar nurseries sheds new light
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Infant planets are ravenous little blighters that quickly devour what remains of the star-circling gas and dust clouds in which they form. The gas in these protoplanetary disks disappears rapidly, within just a few million years. Astronomers now have a better picture of this process of planetary evolution than ever before, thanks to a new study. The research was conducted by an international team of astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), as part of a program called the ALMA Survey of Gas Evolution of PROtoplanetary Disks (AGE-PRO). The AGE-PRO team studied 30 protoplanetary disks around sunlike stars, finding that gas and dust components in these disks evolve at different rates. The amount of gas remaining as these disks are whittled away determines the type of planets these systems produce, the researchers found. The new results could help scientists better understand how planetary systems, including our own solar system, form and evolve. Indeed, the AGE-PRO results have given rise to a staggering 12 research papers by different research teams, showing just how ground-breaking the discovery is. "These studies have revealed how protoplanetary disks evolve over time," AGE-PRO researcher Anibal E. Sierra Morales, of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London (UCL), said in a statement to "The extraordinary results are an essential step toward understanding the initial conditions that lead to the formation of Earth-like planets." The story of protoplanetary disks begins when clumps of overdense, cool gas collapse under their own gravity in interstellar molecular clouds, birthing stars. These infant stars, or "protostars," continue to gather matter from their prenatal envelope of gas. Eventually, what is left behind is a main sequence star surrounded by a flattened, swirling cloud of gas and dust — a protoplanetary disk. Within this disk, conglomerations of material bump together and stick, gathering mass until they form planetesimals. These planetesimals continue to gather material from the protoplanetary disk, and it is from this process that planets grow. It's estimated that protoplanetary disks surround infant stars for several million years, and this sets the time that giant planets have available to form. The initial size and mass of the protoplanetary disk and the speed at which it spins — its angular momentum — determine the kind of planets it is capable of birthing. The lifespan of gas in the disk then determines how long the clumps have to gather and grow into bodies the size of asteroids or planets. Additionally, these factors can also determine if planets migrate through the planetary disk during their youth, moving from their birthplaces closer to or farther away from their star. This, therefore, determines the final shape that the planetary disk will take. Before this new study, researchers had analyzed how the dust content of protoplanetary disks evolves, but the way the gas content changes over time was not as well understood. "AGE-PRO provides the first measurements of gas disk masses and sizes across the lifetime of planet-forming disks," research principal investigator Ke Zhang, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement. Using ALMA the team zoomed into 30 protoplanetary disks of different ages, ranging from 1 million years old to over 5 million years old. These disks were located in the star-birthing regions of the constellations Ophiuchus, Lupus and Upper Scorpius. The sensitivity of ALMA allowed the team to track particular chemical "tracers" that reveal gas and dust masses during vital stages of protoplanetary disk evolution, from initial formation to their inevitable disintegration millions of years later. While carbon monoxide is one of the most commonly used chemical tracers for astronomers, the AGE-Pro team also relied on the molecule diazenylium. ALMA was also able to detect the chemical signatures of other molecules like aldehyde, deuterated cyanogen and cyanomethane, thus painting a more detailed picture of the chemical evolution of protoplanetary disks than ever before. "This is the first large-scale chemical survey of its kind, targeting the 30 disks with a broader range of ages to characterize the gas masses," research co-leader John Carpenter, of the Joint ALMA Observatory, said in the same statement. The research hints at the timeframes at which gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn are born, compared to those for smaller terrestrial worlds like Earth and Mars. "AGE-PRO reveals that the median average of the gas disk mass goes from several Jupiter masses in the early ages of less than 1 million years to less than a Jupiter mass in the first 1 to 3 million years," said AGE-PRO researcher Paola Pinilla, of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at UCL. "This means that disks have the reservoir to form giant planets in the young disks, but as they mature, the fuel for forming giant planets significantly decreases. "However, it is surprising that the disks that survive for longer times of between 2 million to 3 million years, maintain a very similar gas disk mass as the 1 million to 3-million-years-old examples.' Related Stories: — Exoplanet nurseries around infant stars can be much smaller than expected: 'It is astonishing' — James Webb Space Telescope's ground-breaking study of a planet-forming disk hints at future exoplanet discoveries — Exoplanet 'baby pictures' reveal exomoons possibly taking shape around infant worlds Another surprise delivered by ALMA was the fact that, as protoplanetary disks age, the gas and dust within them are consumed at different rates. In particular, the ratio of gas to dust undergoes a "swing" as these swirling flattened clouds age. "The most surprising finding is that, although most disks dissipate after a few million years, the ones that survive have more gas than expected," Zhang said. "This fundamentally changes our estimation of the atmospheric accretion of planets formed at a later time." By comparing AGE-PRO's observations of gas evolution in protoplanetary disks of different ages to other studies of gas evolution, the team can start to paint a broader and more detailed picture of how planetary systems evolve. The 12 new papers will be published in a forthcoming issue of The Astrophysical Journal.
Washington Post
11-06-2025
- Science
- Washington Post
A show on fast fashion's wastefulness is sharp on function, dull on form
Chile's Atacama Desert is among the planet's least hospitable regions and even bears some resemblance to the surface of Mars. But one aspect of the area is not at all otherworldly: The desert contains a world-infamous dump of cast-off clothing. Those mounds of unwanted garments are among the inspirations for 'Source Material: Lessons in Responsible Fashion,' a provocative exhibition at the George Washington University Museum and the Textile Museum.
Washington Post
06-06-2025
- Climate
- Washington Post
A 6.4 magnitude earthquake hits northern Chile, with no reports of casualties
SANTIAGO, Chile — A 6.4 magnitude earthquake struck northern Chile on Friday, causing minor infrastructure damage and cutting power to over 20,000 people. Authorities have not reported any casualties following the tremor. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported the quake hit at 1:15 p.m. local time (5:15 p.m. GMT) at a depth of 76 kilometers (47 miles). Its epicenter was located near the coast of the Atacama Desert. While the quake was felt across several communities in the expansive Atacama Desert region, initial reports confirmed no immediate casualties. Chile's Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service said the earthquake's characteristics did not meet the conditions necessary to generate a tsunami along the South American coast. Miguel Ortiz, deputy director of Chile's national disaster response service, Senapred, said the powerful earthquake caused 'minor' infrastructure damage and power disruptions, leaving nearly 23,000 people without electricity. 'Some minor landslides have been recorded, which are being monitored and coordinated with the municipalities,' he said. Ortiz also noted 'some minor landslides,' which are being monitored and coordinated with local municipalities. Chilean President Gabriel Boric , said on X his government was in communication with the regional presidential delegate, and confirmed there were 'no reported casualties.' ____ Follow AP's coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at
