SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are leaking radiation into the night sky as they circle Earth, which could be interfering with astronomers’ attempts to pick up radio signals arriving from the farthest reaches of the cosmos, a new study shows.
All satellites, including those in SpaceX’s rapidly growing Starlink constellation, emit and receive radio waves to and from our planet to communicate with their operators on the ground. Radio astronomers have known about this for years and can mitigate the impacts these controlled beams have on their work by avoiding these satellites’ locations or accounting for the signals when making calculations.
But in the new study, published July 3 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, researchers have shown that Starlink satellites also emit unintended and previously unrecognized radio signals that are separate from the signals they send to and receive…
