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Looking at space through a window in time

Ever since he first walked the earth, man has stared up at the heavens in wonder.

Our desire to learn more about the universe in which we live has resulted in us putting men on the moon and robots on Mars. We've also sent probes far beyond the heliosphere that encloses our solar system and I have little doubt that we will continue to learn many exciting and interesting things as time goes by.

However, our ability to stare up at the skies, like our ancestors, is being significantly impacted by our own technology and that's not good.

Most readers will already be aware that astronomers are pretty pee'd off with Starlink for the levels of visual pollution being created by its growing constellation of internet satellites.

Well now things are getting worse.

Now we have radio astronomers complaining that the RF signals emitted buy these satellites are also disrupting their attempts to proble the heavens.

Apparently, those RF emissions from Starlink satellites are effectively creating a barrier that thwarts our ability to see far away objects with our radio telescopes.

The problem is all to do with relative power levels.

Although a far away celestial body may be chucking out radio frequencies at levels that dwarf even the power of our own sun, the vast distances and the effect of the inverse-square law mean that by the time those signals reach us they are incredibly weak. That means it takes only a few watts of radio energy being broadcast much closer (just a few hundred Km away in low-earth orbit) to utterly swamp them and effectively render them invisible.

How catastrophic it is that our advancing technology is the very thing that is effectively rendering us blind, when it comes to exploring the universe with our ground-based telescopes.

Are there solutions?

Well I would not be surprised if our only option is to build a radio-frequency version of the Hubble or James Webb space-based telescopes but that would be a massive undertaking.

Because radio-waves are much lower in frequency than light waves, any powerful radio telescope must be huge when compared to a regular light-based telescope. Designing, building and then establishing such a massive radio telescope in a suitable position in space would be a huge undertaking and incredibly expensive.

I suspect there's far more money available for the purpose of allowing people in the back-blocks to watch Netflix via Starnet than there is for the purpose of building a space-based radio telescope so the future doesn't look good.

Perhaps another, somewhat smarter way to deal with this problem would be to reduce the duty-cycle of the Starnet satellites such that they are all switched off for a brief period of time at regular intervals. This may only be a few hundred milliseconds every minute or so.

This off-time would create a very brief window of time through which the ground-based observatories could take a peek at space. This would have very little impact on the overall throughput of the Starnet system with most users being totally unaware that it was happening at all.

If/when they decide to do this, I claim prior art so no patents shall be issued!!

Carpe Diem folks!

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