Ground radio telescopes, space probes, and roving observational robots (Getty)
Star observations lead to the emission of not small amounts of carbon dioxide, which requires astronomers, according to a controversial study, to work to reduce these emissions from the facilities they use in their research, as a contribution to staving off climate danger.
This is the first time that researchers have sought to calculate the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the work tools of 30,000 astronomers, including ground radio telescopes, space probes and roaming robots sent into space.
Preliminary results of the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, indicate that the total activity of these tools since their inception has produced at least 20.3 million tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the carbon stock recorded annually in Estonia or Croatia. The quantity produced by one astronomer is 1.2 million tons annually.
The study confirms that this amount is approximately “five times higher” than that emitted by astronomers’ aerial flights that they make for reasons related to their work.
Observations of stars lead to the emission of significant amounts of carbon dioxide, according to a controversial study
“The astronomers community is currently discussing reducing carbon emissions associated with transportation and the activity of supercomputers,” Jürgen Knodelsider, director of the French National Center for Scientific Research and lead author of the study, told AFP. The tools they use in their work.
To assess the magnitude of this cause, the researcher conducted audits of fifty space missions and forty observing facilities on Earth, including the Hubble Telescope, the Planck Space Observatory, the InSight (Mars) exploration missions, the Rosetta probe (Comet “Churi”) and the VLT Very Large Telescope in Chile.
The ideal approach to tools is to take into account the materials used to build them, their operating costs, and the amount of electricity they use. But this data was often not available, and the reason for this is sometimes due to the lack of transparency on the part of space agencies, according to Knodelsider, who works at the Research Institute specializing in astrophysics and planetary sciences in Toulouse, France.
The team calculates that the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope and the future Square Kilometer Array radio telescope in South Africa and Australia alone will emit at least 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
To fill in these gaps, his team used an approach called “financial ratios” developed by the Agency for Environmental Transformation (Ademe) and the Association for Carbon Credit (ABC), which is based on the idea that the amounts of carbon released by a given activity are proportional to its cost and volume.
Thus, the team’s calculations indicate that the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope and the future Square Kilometer Array radio telescope in South Africa and Australia alone will emit at least 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Jürgen Knodelsider believes that “thinking about greenhouse gas reductions” should be one of the scientists’ tools. “Everyone has to do their part, including astronomers who are not in their ivory towers,” said Annie Hughes, one of the study’s authors who works at the Max Planck Institute, in a press conference.
“I know it may come as a shock, but we have to rein in carbon if we want to cut emissions by 50 percent by 2030,” says fellow astronomer Luigi Tibaldo.
Eric Lagadec, president of the French Society for Astronomy and Astrophysics, who was not involved in the study, said: “Astronomy as a whole activity, leads to significant carbon emissions, and therefore our challenge is to slow down the infrastructure construction process as we continue to seek the ideal solution.” .
Astronomy as a whole activity, leads to significant carbon emissions, and therefore our challenge is to slow down the process of building infrastructure
Commenting on the results of the study, Andrew Ross Wilson wrote in an article commenting on the results of the study that the proposed approach is highly debated, as estimating carbon quantities by adopting the “financial ratios” approach generates a large margin of uncertainty (up to 80 percent), which may “affect the credibility of Results”.
As for astrophysicist Françoise Combe of the Paris-BSL Observatory, she says, “Researchers’ resort to random calculations indicates a failure to obtain details of the quantities consumed by any facility.”
The scientist also objects to dividing the total cost on the number of astronomers, and stresses that “the observatory is built for scientific purposes, and provides benefits to millions of people, and therefore dividing the cost on scientists is similar to dividing the cost of an opera party to only those who attend.”
Eric Lagadec asserts that “the method presented is debatable, but its approach is the first step he takes back to think” of how to address this issue.
(France Brush)