Recent years have been marked by an explosion in the number of satellites sent into low orbit around our planet, led by SpaceX, with its Starlink Internet access program and the 12,000 satellites it plans. The impact of these foreign bodies on observations of the celestial vault was already alarming astronomers using terrestrial observatories. A new study, conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Hessen and published on Thursday in the review Nature Astronomyshows that the quality of the images captured by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope is also degraded by the increase in orbital traffic.
