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Stars are vanishing at a 'shocking rate.' According to new study published Thursday, light pollution has deprived eight out of ten Americans and nearly one-third of all individuals of the capacity to see our own galaxy. The problem is "skyglow," or the gradual brightening of the clear sky induced by artificial light sources.
A recent research published in the journal Science used crowdsourced data from the Globe at Night initiative, which is administered by the network of observatories NOIRLab, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.
When compared to satellite measurements of artificial light on Earth, the study found that skyglow as seen by human eyes is a bigger problem.
The research is the most current in a growing corpus of work on light pollution that extends back at least fifty years.
The researchers detected a 9.6% increase in sky brightness over the last 10 years by analysing over 50,000 observations from citizen scientists, compared to a 2% increase recorded by satellites each year.
"At this rate of change, a kid born at a place where 250 stars were visible would be able to see just around 100 by the time they reached 18," said the study's principal author, Christopher Kyba, a researcher at the German Research Centre for Geosciences.
According to the authors, just 30% of people worldwide and 80% of Americans can see the Milky Way on a clear night.
The types of lighting we utilise also have an impact on what our unassisted eyes can perceive.
LED lights, according to Kyba, have a substantial influence on how bright the sky looks to humans. This element, among others, might explain the disparity between satellite measurements and the sky conditions reported by Globe at Night participants.
Furthermore, satellites have difficulty identifying light that is projected horizontally from sources that are more frequent in cities, such as billboards or storefronts.
"The rate at which stars become invisible to humans in cities is remarkable," Kyba remarked.
