DECRYPTION – In ten years, the quality of night skies has deteriorated.
Seeing the celestial vault becomes a less and less impressive spectacle. Between 2011 and 2022, the number of stars visible to the naked eye at night has decreased sharply, due to an increased luminosity of the night sky, increasing by 7% to 10% per year globally. This increase in light pollution is linked to the extension of urban areas and, above all, to the deployment of new public lighting based on LEDs (light-emitting diodes). Less energy-intensive, they often allowed for brighter or more numerous lighting. This is the result of a publication in Science, on January 19, obtained thanks to the international citizen science project Globe at Night. The luminosity of the sky has quadrupled in eighteen years. In other words, “on a site where 250 stars were visible, their number would have been reduced to 100 over the same period”explains the article.
These results are even more alarmist than those obtained by satellites, which miss part of the lighting…
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