Elon Musk ’s Starlink satellites are wreaking havoc in Earth’s orbit and destroying astronomers’ ability to observe distant planets and stars, scientists have told The Independent. The European Low-Frequency Array radio telescope network , or LOFAR, has examined faint and distant objects across the universe since 2012 to help discover black holes and look for exoplanets. But in the five years since Musk’s private company, SpaceX, began launching its Starlink satellites, an escalation in radio wave emissions has made it much harder for LOFAR to make observations.
“Last year, we started to see interference signals in the sky, we managed to trace them to some of the Starlink satellites from the first generation that were orbiting above the Earth,” Jessica Dempsey, scientific and general director of the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, told The Independent on Thursday. SpaceX now has a constellation of more than 6,000 satellites in orbit, providing high-speed internet to almost anywhere on Earth. Starlink satellites have been emitting unintended electromagnetic radiation, which the LOFAR astronomers believed to be from faulty batteries.
They spoke with SpaceX about mitigating techniques last year, and felt optimistic that the problem was being addressed, Dempsey said. But when the astronomers went to make observations in July, they found that SpaceX’s updated Starlink V2 Mini satellites were causing even more interference. SpaceX has launched even more sat.