The summary is made by artificial intelligence and checked by a human.
Due to light pollution, the starry sky cannot be seen properly in cities and urban areas.
Light pollution already affects 83 percent of people on Earth.
Researchers warn that light pollution affects ecosystems and human health.
Astronomers warned about too much artificial light already in the 1980s.
FRAGRANCE are already dark early. The starry sky is visible shortly after dusk if it is cloudless.
That’s where the familiar night lights are.
The moon in its different phases. The always bright planets Venus and Jupiter. Up high as mere words, the already so familiar Otava and Pohjanstähti. And hundreds of others.
To the starry sky the free and ancient joy it offers has largely been lost in Finland as well.
“Thousands of faint stars are typically missing”, says the editor-in-chief of the magazine Tähdet ja väjä Marko Pekkola.
“Instead of true darkness, artificial lighting colors the sky. This is the case where most Finns also live today.”
Light pollution has spread throughout Europe. In the pollution map, the Benelux countries, the Ruhr industrial area, central England and northern Italy are areas where a person looking at the night sky can hardly discern constellations (areas in red and yellow).
People are concentrated in urban areas and big cities. You can live in the bubble of Ruuhka-Finland’s cay of light for years without seeing a proper starry sky.
Light pollution, or to put it politely, wasted light, spoils the heavenly landscape more and more often. The landscape that man has seen every time he looks up, for thousands of years.
One way to determine a light-polluted area is if the sky is at least ten percent brighter than the normal night sky.
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“In Finland, you can still admire the original night sky from Lapland’s Lemmenjoki and the wilderness of Eastern Kaira.”
Astronomers have talked about light pollution for a long time. Researchers warned about it already in the 1980s.
There was one front fighter International dark sky association IDAwhich was founded by astronomers in 1988.
Even so, light pollution is still increasing by about two percent per year. The night sky can brighten up to a hundred times in some places. The light can be seen even more than a hundred kilometers away from where the light source is.
Light pollution experts estimate that already 83 percent of people on Earth are exposed to it. If surface area is used as a measure, 23 percent of land areas are exposed to light pollution.
Growth accelerated in the 2000s. The amount of light pollution increased by 49 percent between 1997 and 2017.
in Europe heaven is already lost.
About 99 percent of Europeans live under light pollution or light interference. A little salvation can be found in Pohjola.
A couple of corners of rescue can still be found in Finland.
“In Finland, you can still admire the original night sky from Lapland’s Lemmenjoki and the wilderness of Eastern Kaira”, says Pekkola.
If you go far enough into the countryside, you can already see the night sky much better.
In the world light pollution can have an even worse effect, says Pekkola.
Last year, he went to interview star enthusiasts in the most light-polluted country on Earth, Singapore.
That city-state caught a questionable aura from its neighbor, Hong Kong.
Singapore has enough tall buildings and lots of artificial light in a small area.
Singapore lives in a huge light bubble produced by the city-state’s millions of lights.
Pekkola describes the night sky of downtown Singapore in Tähdet ja Avaruus magazine: It is “covered in a milky waste light”.
Valued science magazine Science updated the status of light pollution at the beginning of 2023. It was compiled by a German Christopher Kyba. He works at the German Research Center for Geosciences.
According to the study, the number of stars that stood out in the night sky decreased at a record pace in Europe and North America between 2011 and 2022.
The results were compiled on Globe at Night. More than 50,000 observations were collected. They were collected by comparing how luminous the star appears in the sky with how luminous the star was known in advance.
“A child who can see 250 stars in his hometown when he is born, at this rate, will only see about a hundred stars by the time he turns 18,” Kyba compares.
People and the animals have adapted over the millions of years of evolution to the alternation of night and day, reminds Pekkola.
It should be dark at night, says our body. Continuous nocturnal light is new to many ecosystems.
Scientists are constantly discovering more animal species and ecosystems that suffer from light pollution.
The Milky Way, or our own galaxy, can be seen as a veil in the starry sky. Jupiter’s light reflects off the surface of the sea. The picture was taken in the outer archipelago.
Nature has always been determined in relation to the Sun and the rotation of the Earth, and thus to the variation of light and dark.
It’s not just that too much light can interfere with falling asleep. Light pollution can affect, for example, human cardiovascular diseases.
And to other animals. Many migratory birds orient themselves according to the night sky.
Newly born sea turtles may not be able to find the sea anymore with the help of the moon. They may search for the sea, guided by the lights of beach hotels.
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Noctalgia is a poetic and sad feeling of not seeing the original night sky anymore.
To light pollution has also been awakened at the state level in the 2020s.
In Germany, light pollution has already been included in the insect protection program. The Czechs are farting.
What can an individual do? The answer is easy.
Finger on the switch and off the lights if you don’t need them. Even in the backyard, you should think about the direction of the lights.
In Italy it is not allowed to install a light so that it points straight up. However, the rule is not properly enforced.
LED lights are one of the causes of light pollution these days. They save energy and are cheap.
Next light pollution disappears as soon as we turn off unnecessary lights, reminds the non-fiction writer in his column Markus Hotakainen.
Street lamps, floodlights that emphasize architecture and billboards add light even where it is not needed at all, he reminds.
Hotakainen says that the Astronomical Association Ursa organized a campaign in 2017 called Bongaa Milky Way.
Even then, spotting the Milky Way was difficult in some places in Finland as well.
In the project, one of Nuuksi’s wilderness lakes, Pitkäjärvi, was visited. Even there, the Milky Way could barely stand out, Hotakainen remembers. The surrounding capital region produced so much light.
Pari an astronomer published a new concept in Science magazine in autumn 2023. Noctalgia related to light pollution.
Noctalgia there is a poetic and sad feeling of not seeing the original night sky anymore. A large part of people are losing their grip on the earth’s vast cultural heritage.
One that would be easy to spot right away. You could see it just by looking up.
Correction on October 31 at 4:05 p.m.: Markus Hotakainen is a non-fiction writer, not an astronomer.