The Future Generations Won't Be Able To Admire The Starry Sky

As impressive as it is to look up at the stars in the night sky, research says that people may not have this ability in the future as the brightness of the sky continues to increase. The problem, however, seems to be more serious.
If you look up on a clear night, you are struck by the beauty of the universe. If you look too long, you might get dizzy. The further away from the city you are, the more calmly you can enjoy and admire the greatness of space.

However, in the future people may not be able to look at the starry sky in the same way that we do today. Consider that if a child born today can look up and see about 250 stars in the night sky, by their 18th birthday 150 of those stars will have disappeared from view. As scientists inform us, this is due to light pollution, which - according to a recent study - is rapidly worsening.

The night sky is getting brighter (and that's not a good thing)

Evidence shows that every year the sky becomes brighter and brighter by "swallowing" stars. In particular, the night sky is getting about 10% brighter every year, according to Christopher Kyba of the German Research Center for Geosciences and his colleagues, who worked with thousands of citizens around the world to measure changes in sky light over last 12 years. The results of their research were published in the scientific journal Science.

In particular, measuring the brightness of the sky, and by extension the overall visibility of the stars, is extremely difficult. To measure what the naked eye can see, the researchers turned to people's own observations, which totaled more than 50,000 and were recorded as part of an ongoing project called Globe at Night.

It is worth noting, however, that the figure of 10% is a global average, as sky brightness varies by continent, country and even city. "Based on our previous work with satellite data, growth rates are faster in developing countries," says Kyba. "But it's important to keep in mind that they're starting from a much lower base, so (for example) a 1% increase in Germany would probably mean a lot more new overall light than a 10% increase in Ghana."

Because the problem is more serious
However, the problem is not only that people in the future will not be able to admire and dream under the starry sky. Something much more important is at stake here. Light pollution, a phenomenon in which there is excessive, unwanted or annoying artificial light, has important effects such as extinguishing the light of the stars in the night sky that we mentioned, disturbing the balance of the ecosystem, hindering astronomical research and even health itself of the people. In other words, the "endless glow" of the night sky is yet another environmental problem, even though we may not think of it as such.

According to previous studies, too much extra light at night is particularly harmful to insects, plants and even fish. It can also cause the human body to produce less melatonin, with all that this implies for our sleep.

"[...] people are generally only impressed by the "beauty" of city lights, as if they were lights on a Christmas tree. They don't realize that these are pollution images," write light pollution researchers Fabio Falchi and Salvador Bara, of the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, in a paper commenting on the study by Kyba and colleagues.

What will happen next

Researcher Kyba and his colleagues see their data as a warning that most of their current efforts to reduce light pollution aren't really working. For example, putting shields on street lights so they don't shine skyward sounds like a great solution, but Kyba explains that light shining horizontally can actually be more of a problem than light shining straight up. . This is because light shining towards the horizon has a better chance of being scattered by materials in the atmosphere and illuminating the sky.

The expert insists that approaches such as requiring buildings to turn off interior and exterior lights at a specific time when no people are inside could also help. The researchers expect to get more data from Globe at Night, mostly from people in parts of the world not represented by the study above, which means anywhere but North America, Europe and Japan.

You can read the study here
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abq7781
source
https://www.ow.gr/living/giati-oi-mellontikes-genies-den-tha-boroun-na-thavmazoun-ton-enastro-ourano/