Light pollution is skyrocketing

TL;DR

Artificial light pollution at night is rapidly increasing, obscuring stars and posing ecological and health risks, requiring improved satellite monitoring and urgent mitigation efforts.

Contribution

This paper highlights the rapid rise of light pollution, its detection challenges with current satellites, and emphasizes the need for new satellite technology and policy actions.

Findings

Sky background increases by 10% annually due to artificial lights.

Current satellites cannot detect blue peak emissions from LEDs.

Urgent need for policies to reverse light pollution trend.

Abstract

Artificial light at night is a pollutant that is rising fast, as demonstrated by Kyba et al. (1) work by analyzing ten of thousands observations by citizen scientists in the last 12 years. The study found that the dimmest stars are vanishing, progressively hidden by a 10 percent yearly increase of the sky background due to artificial lights. This increase is difficult to be detected by the global coverage satellites now in operation, due to detector's blindness to the blue peak of white LEDs that are progressively replacing older technology lamps. This shows the need for a satellite with nighttime multi band capability in the visible light to study and control future evolution. More importantly, a call for a strong reverse in the light pollution rising trend is extremely urgent to avoid all the cultural, scientific, energetic, ecological and health negative effects of artificial nightlights.