Only one third of humanity can see the Milky Way, study finds

Our home galaxy, the Milky Way, has been visible as a stream of stars across the night sky for billions of years, and yet many people alive today haven’t been able to appreciate this cosmic display due to light pollution, according to a new study in the journal Science Advances.

Light pollution is the term used to describe the slow glow in the night sky above caused by a massive amount of artificial lights. Common in developed countries, light pollution prevents amateur skywatchers from seeing only the absolute brightest objects in the sky.

“We’ve got whole generations of people in the United States who have never seen the Milky Way,” study author Chris Elvidge, a scientist with NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said in a statement sent to redOrbit. “It’s a big part of our connection to the cosmos — and it’s been lost.”

For the study, researchers made an updated atlas of light pollution for the entire planet. With high-resolution satellite information and detailed sky brightness measurements, the team said they generated the most precise evaluation yet of the global effect of light pollution.

“I hope that this atlas will finally open the eyes of people to light pollution,” said lead author Fabio Falchi from the Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute in Italy.

Using the NOAA/NASA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite, the team was able to leverage state-of-the-art low light imaging technology for their study. The team found light pollution is most pervasive in densely-populated nations Italy and South Korea. Canada and Australia were found to have the most dark sky. In Europe, small areas of dark sky remain in Scotland, Sweden and Norway. Despite the amount of unsettled land in the American West, almost half of the US is affected by light pollution.

“In the US, some of our national parks are just about the last refuge of darkness – places like Yellowstone and the desert southwest,” said study author Dan Duriscoe of the National Park Service. “We’re lucky to have a lot of public land that provides a buffer from large cities.”

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Image credit: Falchi et al, Science Advances; Jakob Grothe/National Park Service, Matthew Price/CIRES/CU-Boulder.

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