Light Pollution Is Dimming Our View of the Sky

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光污染正让天空“暗淡 ”

Most stars are invisible against the overhead glare from city lights. At best， there is only a hint of the Milky Way to see： the combined radiance of a hundred billion stars dims to near nothingness by bright streetlamps and storefronts.

This is light pollution—human-generated lights cast up into the heavens—causing the sky itself to glow and washing out the stars. Astronomers have known for years the situation is bad for stargazing， and it also has real and negative effects on the well-being of many living things—plants， animals and even human beings. More than 80 percent of humanity is affected by light pollution， their view of the skies being stolen away.

Christopher Kyba， the light-pollution researcher of the GFZ German Research Center for Geosciences， and his team examined an astonishing amount of data from more than 50，000 citizen scientists from around the world who sampled their local sky brightness from 2011 to 2022. While there was considerable place-to-place variability—for example， on average， Europe saw a 6.5 percent increase in light pollution per year， while North America saw a 10.4 percent increase—the researchers found that globally， light pollution increased by 9.6 percent per year over the time period.

This may not sound like much， but a year-over-year growth of about 10 percent means sky brightness is doubling about every seven years. A moment’s thought should make clear why this is deeply troubling.

在我们头顶上方的城市强光下，大多数星星都看不到了。（剩余2535字）