Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies

Posted by upofadown 15 hours ago

Comments

Comment by moeffju 10 hours ago

I realize this is off topic, but why do people use Claude of all models to write these, when its style is so obvious and so grating? I just immediately hit Back on the first Claudism.

Comment by sigmoid10 4 hours ago

Not to mention 13 em-dashes in a 500 word post. At this point you may as well ask Claude yourself about news and cut out the middleman. That'll also cut into their attempts to manipulate your opinion.

Comment by Dlemlo 9 hours ago

Did you care about the writing style of Rex Edison before and now you are disappointed?

That page is not the New Yorker.

And don't get me wrong, but the writing of normal newspaper became shit through the internet not due to claude. You have the clickbait header, than you have the subtext which repeats the clickbait header, then you had the first paragraph which repeats the subheader, than you had the second paragraph giving you some random 'background infos' and then you got the gist of the story in the 3 or 4th paragraph.

Comment by devilbunny 5 hours ago

Clickbait headlines have a long history. Go look up old newspapermen’s reminiscences about them. The most famous are classics like “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” (1983) from the NY Post or “STICKS NIX HICK PIX” (1935) from Variety.

Comment by ccamrobertson 13 hours ago

While I pine for a dark sky, it makes sense that these operations should move in the same way century old optical telescopes in cities are no longer used for cutting edge science.

The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.

Comment by beloch 8 hours ago

People need light to see in cities. This light serves a function.

Starlink satellites are emitting unintended and useless EMR that serves no function. It is not necessary for the function of these satellites.

This is a money issue. The question you should ask is whether it will cost more for SpaceX to fix their satellites than it will to build radio telescopes (which are not small devices) in space. Personally, I suspect launching radio telescopes into space will not be the cheaper solution.

Comment by throw0101a 4 hours ago

> People need light to see in cities. This light serves a function.

Street lights with (full) cutoff will still provide light for people:

* https://www.blancocountynightsky.org/guidelines.php

* https://highways.dot.gov/safety/other/visibility/fhwa-lighti...

* https://www.zgsm-china.com/blog/light-distribution-of-outdoo...

In fact it will improve the situations as all the light will be directed down, and so you'll need fewer lumens/lux/candela since half won't be waste going up (saving electricity), less glare on the roads after rain, and folks won't have street light blasting through their windows.

Comment by Dlemlo 9 hours ago

So because 10 Million people want to have internet, 8 Billion people no longer get acccess to that resource?

That sounds like a nice attitude from you.

Comment by JuniperMesos 8 hours ago

There's a lot fewer than 8 billion people who have access to the resource of "radio astronomy". I suspect it is in fact less than the 10 million figure of people who might want to use satellite-provided internet.

Comment by michaelmrose 1 hour ago

[dead]

Comment by ungreased0675 4 hours ago

Exponentially more people benefit from Starlink than from radio astronomy. It doesn’t need to be a one or the other conversation though.

Comment by ButlerianJihad 8 hours ago

Instruments on the far side of the Moon will need some communication with Earth. While you can fantasize about running very long surface cables, the common solution consists of orbiting communications satellites.

There are currently at least 8 satellites orbiting the Moon. We can expect that number to increase. Also to add to the excitement, when a satellite deorbits there, it will never slow down, burn, fall into water, or disintegrate. Just one big hunk of equipment impacting at full speed. Enjoy your craters.

Comment by m4rtink 33 minutes ago

And ? You are just describing how the lunar environment works.

There are more peculiarities, like most orbits being long term unstable, abrasive dust, etc.

But nothing that can't be habdled with good engineering.

Comment by dylan604 12 hours ago

You do realize that the far side of the moon is in direct sunlight for 2 weeks, right?

Comment by stackghost 11 hours ago

It’s also in darkness for 2 weeks. Terrestrial radio telescopes experience sunlight too. That would seem to be a solved problem.

Comment by dylan604 11 hours ago

and the moon is over 200°F in that sunlight.

Comment by ffsm8 10 hours ago

There is no atmosphere to speak of, so only if directly exposed. Hence that's a solvable issue.

The whole thing is incredibly expensive though, while it may be doable with current technology, the amount of money they'd have to set aside may be a hard sell for the miniscule potential of this research - at least from the lens of 2026... So the original position of the article makes sense, it may become functionally impossible, even if technically possible

Comment by stackghost 8 hours ago

So, less than the boiling temp of water. That is not outside the realm of solvable problems

Comment by cozzyd 12 hours ago

Just wait until wireless networks on the moon ruin that too.

Comment by isodev 11 hours ago

Or Space Karen can fix his space junk...

Maybe even start paying for the toxic waste he is landing when his junk continuously fails to stay up and re-enters the atmosphere.

Comment by bob1029 9 hours ago

There is some evidence that little engineering effort has been put into mitigating this problem. I think if someone actually tried really hard we could make these birds a lot quieter.

> We compared the detected power flux densities of this UEMR to that emitted by the first generation v1.0 and v1.5 Starlink satellites. When correcting for the observed satellite distances, we find that the second-generation satellites emit UEMR that is up to a factor of 32 stronger compared to the first generation.

https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2024/09/aa51856-24/aa5...

Comment by femto 8 hours ago

There's probably a reason for that.

> Current ITU regulations ignore unintended satellite hardware leakage, leaving astronomers without legal protection.

Oh, what a coincidence.

Comment by inemesitaffia 6 hours ago

Another reason is these emissions are from power supplies

Comment by robryan 13 hours ago

> Algorithmic mitigation is being explored, but scientists describe it as “embryonic” — potentially demanding computing power that rivals the science processing itself.

It sounds like this would work? Just be more costly, at least in the short term.

> Engineering fixes are the real answer

What is the fix and tradeoff? The article doesn't seem to cover it at all.

Comment by ahepp 12 hours ago

> The accidental static bleeding from onboard hardware, coupling through satellite structures and radiating across frequencies nobody authorized.

> The numbers tell the story bluntly:

I wouldn't waste too much compute trying to parse it, lots of LLM tells in the article. Pangram puts it at 100% AI.

Comment by RockRobotRock 13 hours ago

maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy

Comment by defrost 13 hours ago

We had that before Starlink flooded the radio quiet zones with leakage.

Comment by bcraven 13 hours ago

Were that the case, there would have been nobody buying Starlink.

As they are, I think you are wrong.

Comment by lokar 10 hours ago

My neighborhood has both cable and fiber, both >= 1Gbps, fairly cheap

My neighbor has starlink. I assume because they are MAGA.

Comment by RockRobotRock 7 hours ago

okay for real, i think you have elon derangement syndrome.

Comment by Hugsbox 1 hour ago

I'm Canadian, I disapprove strongly of Elon and his antics, and there are cable and fibre options in my neighbourhood, but Starlink is cheaper and I need to pinch pennies everywhere I can. And the service is excellent.

Comment by testing22321 10 hours ago

You mean privileged people in developed countries had it. Billions of people did not.

I’ve seen the first hand impact of starlink in communities that before had dialup as the fastest option from Australia to Tunisia to remote arctic Canada.

Medical stuff, school, talking to loved ones.

Comment by chaostheory 13 hours ago

Not everyone lives within a metro that has good infrastructure. This is even more true in developing countries.

Comment by dghlsakjg 12 hours ago

More tech people need to go places.

I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.

Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.

Comment by cozzyd 13 hours ago

These are either incidental or unauthorized transmissions. Not the Ku band downlink to terminals.

Comment by inemesitaffia 6 hours ago

They are leakage from switching mode power supplies.

Comment by throw0101a 4 hours ago

> maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy

Maybe Starlink can design proper filters and shielding so both Internet and astronomy can happen at the same time.

Comment by Dlemlo 9 hours ago

Maybe but people already had plenty of internet before Starlink.

Everyone i know who is using starlink doesn't use starlink because htey need starlink for internet.

Comment by RockRobotRock 6 hours ago

Is that because everyone you know lives in a high-wealth country/area?

Comment by lukeify 7 hours ago

As if most people use the Internet for proper utility and not just creating and consuming outrage-bait and slop. Suddenly the cost-benefit of "internet for people on earth" seems a lot less genuine.

You need surprisingly little bandwidth to send and receive messages, make calls, and read the news.

Comment by sh-run 13 hours ago

I have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.

Comment by Zarathustra30 9 hours ago

The two aren't mutually exclusive, as long as aluminum foil is within a trillionaire's budget.

Comment by RockRobotRock 6 hours ago

Google "Ukraine war Starlink". Neolibs who hate Musk's companies unconditionally are going to go quiet real fucking fast, I bet.

Comment by stackghost 13 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by cwillu 13 hours ago

“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Comment by stackghost 12 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by RockRobotRock 12 hours ago

I’m a human that just so happens to disagree with you. I don’t like Elon either, but what I dislike more is that it’s impossible to talk about any of his companies without people like you assuming my motives.

Comment by stackghost 11 hours ago

What precisely are your motives, then?

The umpteenth example of Musk companies behaving poorly and here you come to suggest that we can’t let pesky things like science stand in the way of “the internet”. As if Starlink services is synonymous with the internet itself. The implication is clear, to me at least.

Comment by JuniperMesos 8 hours ago

Yeah Starlink is clearly so much better than the satellite internet that came before it that I think it's reasonable to want to expand it, even at the cost of making radio astronomy on Earth's surface harder. Fast, reliable internet access in places where it's infeasible to string high-bandwidth physical connections is a pretty valuable human good, and radio astronomy can be done in space (perhaps using technology similar to Starlink satellites themselves!).

Comment by RockRobotRock 11 hours ago

Precise motives? I don’t know, I don’t think I have any. I don’t use starlink myself or have a Tesla or invest in any of his companies. Feels silly to disclaim that, but there you go.

Having used starlink before on a plane and on land, it’s fast and seems far superior to previous generations of satellite internet. I’m earnestly asking if creating problems for astronomers is outweighed by giving more people access to the internet. Not just giving them “access”, but giving them very fast and low latency access.

Comment by Hizonner 13 hours ago

That might be dispositive if we didn't already have almost everybody on Earth wired up without using satellites.

Comment by asdfasgasdgasdg 13 hours ago

The fact that so many people are paying for starlink suggests that it is adding something important that was missing before.

Comment by Hizonner 2 hours ago

Starlink has 12 million subscribers, or about 0.14 percent of the population of Earth. In addition to paying for Starlink, those subscribers are externalizing costs to everybody else on Earth... for instance by screwing up radio astronomy.

It is unreasonable to talk about allowing 0.14 percent of the people on Earth to have Internet as if "Internet for people on earth" were at stake. I mean, yes, they are people, and they are on Earth. You could say the same if it were two people... but that's not the slant intended by phrasing that way.

It's especially unreasonable when many of those 0.14 percent want Starlink because of their personal lifestyle choice to live in the middle of nowhere. Yes, I know, somebody's grandpappy built his farm with his own two hands and the help of his trusty plow goat, Irving. That doesn't mean that person is entitled to infinite subsidies in the form of satellite access, fiber, roads, electricity, hospitals, or anything else. Economic activity can justify some of those things (and a lot of that can be priced in by markets). If you're not doing something useful, and you can't pay for all that stuff including traditionally-externalized costs, then move.

Comment by fluidcruft 13 hours ago

Streaming video on airplane flights?

Comment by db48x 13 hours ago

Most of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.

Comment by defrost 13 hours ago

Seems like a case for the US having better fibre deployment than it does for leaking interference from unshielded poorly made tin cans.

Comment by fluidcruft 33 minutes ago

Don't even need fiber. Starlink is only on par with 5G.

Comment by wbl 11 hours ago

Fibre rolls in a dense city have different economics from somewhere with just a few people per square mile.

Comment by defrost 11 hours ago

and yet Western Australia, 3x size of Texas with less than a million people in 1980 had a telephone network that covered the population.

The "sums are different for rural V urban" doesn't make leaky tin cans a better solution over fibre to population, particularly given the downsides.

Comment by db48x 10 hours ago

Pretty sure we achieved that level of coverage here in the US a decade or more earlier than that. A lot of those same rural customers still rely on the telephone system for Internet access. They might be able to get DSL now, but the speeds are going to be low; often just a few hundred kilobits per second.

Comment by defrost 10 hours ago

So pull modern fibre; as should be done.

Comment by hvb2 10 hours ago

And who pays for those miles of fiber? That one customer, because he chose to live there?

I assume you understand that it that's the case, Starlink is a much better option as it won't cost them 5 figures upfront

Comment by gordonhart 12 hours ago

~80% of Starlink customers are not in the US.

Comment by defrost 11 hours ago

That'd be a point to make to the GP db48x

Comment by db48x 10 hours ago

No, I mean globally most of their customers are rural. Starlink is limited primarily by customer density rather than by absolute numbers. They can provide service to just so many people per square mile before the speed drops below the customer’s tolerance. Most of the square miles in the world are rural, therefore most of the customers are as well.

Plus cities have Starlink’s best competition. Starlink is amazing but FTTH is even better. If you can get FTTH at all then you probably won’t even consider Starlink. Nor should you.

Comment by inemesitaffia 6 hours ago

Suburban+Urban is more than rural.

Rural more than Urban

Comment by sippingabonedry 12 hours ago

Got a source for that?

Because there's entire continents of people who think it's the most ridiculous statement they've ever read on this site (which they can only access because of Starlink).

Comment by electric_mayhem 14 hours ago

That’s a mighty nice field of study you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it

Comment by db48x 13 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by Dracophoenix 12 hours ago

An endowment isn't free money and launching a telescope into space remains a costlier venture than plopping a few arrays on mountains like Mauna Kea or atop the Chilean Andes. Contrary to your imagination, radio telescopes aren't that cheap either. The Smithsonian and NASA fund most of the construction, operation, and maintenance of Harvard's telescopes rather than the university. Suffice it to say, it's unlikely an academic institution will find an economically viable route to launching space telescopes any earlier than twenty years from now.

Comment by db48x 11 hours ago

Sure, sure. The endowment generates revenue which is then spent on stuff. Harvard spends billions every year on stuff. A small slice of that spending over the last decade could have gotten them a huge scientific and prestige boon: the first major private telescope in space. (Cubesats don’t count.)

Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?

Comment by Dracophoenix 10 hours ago

What you call "the endowment " doesn't exist in any monolithic sense. "The endowment" is a disparate collection of donations from alumni such as scholarships, artwork, buildings, etc., governed by their respective, specifically-worded contracts. Many of these gifts aren't easily convertible to cash. In fact, a large cash gift is rarely offered at all and rarer still would any such gift come unconditionally.

> Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?

The government's justification has historically been that the research value gained by putting the brightest minds to work at the frontier of academic science is worth the allocation of necessary monies. Whether that is (or has been) true is obviously debatable.

Comment by pclmulqdq 10 hours ago

Cubesats can’t take very good pictures. You need a big mirror to get really clear imagery and you can’t cram one of those in a cubesat. Space telescopes are by nature massive, heavy satellites unless they aren’t intended to look very far or see very much. The other option is to cheaply build something absolutely massive on Earth.

Comment by defrost 13 hours ago

Ground constellations (eg: SKA in radio astronomy) are still vastly cheaper than orbiting arrays, also easier wrt incremental upgrade via physical visits, etc.

Comment by db48x 11 hours ago

Upgrades are overrated. Stick your telescope in sun–synchronous orbit and leave it there. Launch a better one every year or three. After a few launches your undergrads will still be excited to use that first telescope, your PhD students will use the next several, and your faculty will all be drooling over the latest.

Upgrades don’t increase capacity.

Oh, and we’ve got universities spending billions of taxpayer money to carve up mountains in Peru to build telescopes on top. Those are not cheaper than space telescopes would be.

Comment by defrost 10 hours ago

Again: Radio astronomy.

> universities spending billions of taxpayer money to carve up mountains in Peru to build telescopes on top

Which university and telescope are you talking about?

> Those are not cheaper than space telescopes would be.

In general, they are - take a ground based telescopes costs, now harden it for space (extra cost), now "do the right stuff" to ensure it will work in isolation (more cost), and now package it it and launch it (more cost again).

Comment by gigatexal 9 hours ago

Another example of billionaire wait trillionaire power capture. It’s really tough for democracy when one man has all that power. Hah Elon is lex luthor.

Comment by spdustin 14 hours ago

I just have to say: I _hate_ with a white-hot fury the growing usage of html-load and error-report dot com bullshit on these sites. I block those domains for gratuitous ad-serving, and sites just cycle a modal error now.

(I know, I could disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it on a site-by-site basis. Maybe that time has come.)