The night sky has been brightening faster than researchers realized, thanks to the use of artificial lights at night. A study of more than 50,000 observations of stars by citizen scientists reveals that the night sky grew about 10 percent brighter, on average, every year from 2011 to 2022.

In other words, a baby born in a region where roughly 250 stars were visible every night would see only 100 stars on their 18th birthday, researchers report in the Jan. 20 Science.

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The perils of light pollution go far beyond not being able to see as many stars. Too much brightness at night can harm people’s health, send migrating birds flying into buildings, disrupt food webs by drawing pollinating insects toward lights instead of plants and may even interrupt fireflies trying to have sex (SN: 8/2/17; SN: 8/12/15).

“In a way, this is a call to action,” says astronomer Connie Walker of the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Tucson. “People should consider that this does have an impact on our lives. It’s not just astronomy. It impacts our health. It impacts other animals who cannot speak for themselves.”

Walker works with the Globe at Night campaign, which began in the mid-2000s as an outreach project to connect students in Arizona and Chile and now has thousands of participants worldwide. Contributors compare the stars they can see with maps of what stars would be visible at different levels of light pollution, and enter the results on an app.

“I’d been quite skeptical of Globe at Night” as a tool for precision research, admits physicist Christopher Kyba of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam. But the power is in the sheer numbers: Kyba and colleagues analyzed 51,351 individual data points collected from 2011 to 2022.

“The individual data are not precise, but there’s a whole lot of them,” he says. “This Globe at Night project is not just a game; it’s really useful data. And the more people participate, the more powerful it gets.”

Those data, combined with a global atlas of sky luminance published in 2016, allowed the team to conclude that the night sky’s brightness increased by an average 9.6 percent per year from 2011 to 2022 (SN: 6/10/16).

Most of that increase was missed by satellites that collect brightness data across the globe. Those measurements saw just a 2 percent increase in brightness per year over the last decade.

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There are several reasons for that, Kyba says. Since the early 2010s, many outdoor lights have switched from high-pressure sodium lightbulbs to LEDs. LEDs are more energy efficient, which has environmental benefits and cost savings.

But LEDs also emit more short-wavelength blue light, which scatters off particles in the atmosphere more than sodium bulbs’ orange light, creating more sky glow. Existing satellites are not sensitive to blue wavelengths, so they underestimate the light pollution coming from LEDs. And satellites may miss light that shines toward the horizon, such as light emitted by a sign or from a window, rather than straight up or down.

Satellites have missed some of the light pollution from LEDs, which emit in blue wavelengths. This image from the International Space Station shows LEDs in the center of Milan glowing brighter than the orange lights in the suburbs.Samantha Cristoforetti, NASA, ESA

Astronomer and light pollution researcher John Barentine was not surprised that satellites underestimated the problem. But “I was still surprised by how much of an underestimate it was,” he says. “This paper is confirming that we’ve been undercounting light pollution in the world.”

The good news is that no major technological breakthroughs are needed to help fix the problem. Scientists and policy makers just need to convince people to change how they use light at night — easier said than done.

“People sometimes say light pollution is the easiest pollution to solve, because you just have to turn a switch and it goes away,” Kyba says. “That’s true. But it’s ignoring the social problem — that this overall problem of light pollution is made by billions of individual decisions.”

Some simple solutions include dimming or turning off lights overnight, especially floodlighting or lights in empty parking lots.

Kyba shared a story about a church in Slovenia that switched from four 400-watt floodlights to a single 58-watt LED, shining behind a cutout of the church to focus the light on its facade. The result was a 96 percent reduction in energy use and much less wasted light , Kyba reported in the International Journal of Sustainable Lighting in 2018. The church was still lit up, but the grass, trees and sky around it remained dark.

“If it was possible to replicate that story over and over again throughout our society, it would suggest you could really drastically reduce the light in the sky, still have a lit environment and have better vision and consume a lot less energy,” he says. “This is kind of the dream.”

Barentine, who leads a private dark-sky consulting firm, thinks widespread awareness of the problem — and subsequent action — could be imminent. For comparison, he points to a highly publicized oil slick fire on the Cuyahoga River, outside of Cleveland, in 1969 that fueled the environmental movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and prompted the U.S. Congress to pass the Clean Water Act.

“I think we’re on the precipice, maybe, of having the river-on-fire moment for light pollution,” he says. More

The sun turns once a month and the Earth once a day, but a white dwarf star 2,000 light-years away spins every 25 seconds, beating the old champ by five seconds. That makes it the fastest-spinning star of any sort ever seen — unless you consider such exotic objects as neutron stars and black holes, some of which spin even faster, to be stars (SN: 3/13/07).  

About as small as Earth but roughly as massive as the sun, a white dwarf is extremely dense. The star’s surface gravity is so great that if you dropped a pebble from a height of a few feet, it would smash into the surface at thousands of miles per hour. The typical white dwarf takes hours or days to spin.

The fast-spinning white dwarf, named LAMOST J0240+1952 and located in the constellation Aries, got in a whirl because of its ongoing affair with a red dwarf star that revolves around it. Just as falling water makes a waterwheel turn, so gas falling from the red companion star made the white dwarf twirl.

The discovery occurred the night of August 7, when astronomer Ingrid Pelisoli of the University of Warwick in Coventry, England, and her colleagues detected a periodic blip of light from the dim duo. The blip repeated every 24.93 seconds, revealing the white dwarf star’s record-breaking rotation period, the researchers report August 26 at arXiv.org.

The star’s only known rival is an even faster-spinning object in orbit with the blue star HD 49798. But that rapid rotator’s nature is unclear, with some recent studies saying it is likely a neutron star, not a white dwarf. More

It’s time to drop the magnets, meteorite hunters. The commonly used method for identifying space rocks can destroy scientific information.

Touching even a small magnet to a meteorite can erase any record the rock might have retained about the magnetic field of its parent body, researchers report in the April Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. And the concern isn’t theoretical: a subset of the oldest known Martian meteorites appear to have already had their magnetic memories wiped, the team showed. 

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Scientists often turn to meteorites to get a closeup look at other worlds, as well as understand our own. The space rocks can contain traces of planetary atmospheres, the chemical building blocks for life and more (SN: 1/26/21; SN: 4/26/22).

Planetary scientist Foteini Vervelidou uses meteorites from Mars — chunks of the planet that were blasted into space by an impact and later captured by Earth’s gravity — to study its ancient past. Just a few hundred are known to exist. Rarer still are specimens that contain minerals carrying imprints of the Red Planet’s magnetic field, which collapsed about 3.7 billion years ago (SN: 9/7/15). The oldest known Martian meteorites, which date to roughly 4.4 billion years ago, therefore present an “amazing chance to study the magnetic field,” says Vervelidou, of MIT and the Institute of Earth Physics of Paris. 

But such opportunities can be readily squandered, Vervelidou and colleagues have shown. The team’s numerical calculations and experiments with earthly rocks — stand-ins for meteorites — confirmed that bringing a hand magnet close to a rock can rearrange the spins of the rock’s electrons. That rearrangement overwrites the imprint of a previous magnetic field, a process called remagnetization.What’s more, the process appears to happen frequently. The team examined nine meteorites found at different times and places on Earth. All of them are thought to have originated from the same oldest known chunk of Mars, which most likely broke up when it entered Earth’s atmosphere. All had been remagnetized.  

The finding is unfortunate, but it’s not surprising, says Melinda Hutson, a meteoriticist at Portland State University in Oregon and the curator of the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory who was not involved in the research. “Just about everyone wants to stick a magnet on the side of a potential meteorite.”

It is possible to evaluate a meteorite without destroying its magnetic properties. Vervelidou uses a lab instrument called a susceptibility meter, which measures how an object would respond to a magnetic field. And portable versions exist: She and a team of meteorite researchers used one to find nearly 1,000 meteorites on a recent expedition in Chile. Hopefully, Vervelidou says, some of those space rocks will shed light on Mars’ magnetic past. More

This is what it looks like to land on Mars.
NASA’s Perseverance rover took this video on February 18 as a jetpack lowered it onto the Red Planet’s surface.
“It gives me goosebumps every time I see it,” said engineer David Gruel of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., at a news briefing on February 22.
The movie begins with the rover’s parachute opening above it as the rover and its landing gear enter the Martian atmosphere. Seconds later, a camera on the rover’s underside shows the heat shield falling toward the ground. If you look carefully, you can see one of the springs that pushed the heat shield off the rover came loose, said NASA engineer Allen Chen, the rover’s entry, descent and landing lead.
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NASA’s Perseverance rover captured video of its own landing using a set of cameras on the back of the entry vehicle, the sky crane and the rover itself.
“There’s no danger to the spacecraft here, but it’s something we didn’t expect, and wouldn’t have seen” without the videos, he said.
The rover filmed the ground coming closer and closer, getting glimpses of a river delta, craters, ripples and fractured terrain. Cameras on the top and bottom of the rover captured clouds of dust billowing as the rover’s jetpack, the sky crane, lowered it down to the ground on three cables. A camera on the sky crane showed the rover swinging slightly as it descended. Finally, the sky crane disconnected the cables and flew away, leaving Perseverance to begin its mission.
“It’s hard to express how emotional it was and how exciting it was to everybody” to see the movie for the first time, said deputy project manager Matt Wallace. “Every time we got something, people were overjoyed, giddy. They were like kids in a candy store.”
The movie looks so much like animations of the sky crane landing technique that NASA had released in the past that it almost doesn’t look real, says imaging scientist Justin Maki. “I can attest to, it’s real,” he says. “It’s stunning and it’s real.”

The rover also captured audio from the surface of the Red Planet for the first time, including a gust of Martian wind.
Perseverance landed in an ancient lakebed called Jezero crater, about two kilometers from what looks like an ancient river delta feeding into the crater (SN: 2/18/21). The rover’s primary mission is to search for signs of past life and to cache rock samples for a future mission to return to Earth.
The first images Perseverance sent back from Mars showed its wheels on a flat expanse. The ground is strewn with rocks that are shot through with holes, said deputy project scientist Katie Stack Morgan in a news briefing on February 19.
“Depending on the origins of the rocks, these holes could mean different things,” she said. The science team thinks the holes could be from gases escaping volcanic rock as lava cooled, or from fluid moving through the rock and dissolving it away. “Both would be equally exciting for the team.”

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The Ingenuity helicopter proved it could fly on Mars. Now it has loftier goals. Having passed all its original engineering tests, the tiny spacecraft will now begin a new job, supporting the Perseverance rover in its science mission.

“It’s like Ingenuity is graduating,” said Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in a news briefing on April 30.

The helicopter arrived at Mars with two main goals: demonstrate that flight was possible on the Red Planet and show that it could return critical flight data to Earth. Those were both achieved in Ingenuity’s first flight on April 19 and then surpassed as the helicopter flew farther, higher and faster on April 22 and April 25 (SN: 4/19/21).

The original plan was for Ingenuity to take up to six flights total, then ground itself forever as Perseverance drove away to do science. That was partly because the Perseverance team expected to drive far from the rover’s landing site in search of rocks that might preserve signs of past Martian life (SN: 2/22/21).

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“We thought we would be doing an intensive drive campaign in which the helicopter would not be able to keep up,” said Perseverance project scientist Ken Farley of Caltech in the briefing. “But based on the rocks we have seen in the area, we really wish to spend a considerable amount of time where we are.”

Ingenuity has also been performing surprisingly well, Aung said. The rover and the helicopter might be able to communicate from more than a kilometer apart, giving them both more flexibility.

Ingenuity took its fourth flight on April 30 to scout for a new launch pad. The fifth flight, to be scheduled after the team has examined the data, will be a one-way journey to that new home.

After that, Ingenuity will switch into support mode. Up until now, the Perseverance team has generously supported the helicopter, Aung said. “The rover is primary going forward,” she said.

The helicopter will have future flights in support mode. The team says Ingenuity will scout potential scientific observations and rover routes from the sky, make 3-D digital elevation maps and take a look at places a rover can’t go. “The lessons learned from that exercise will benefit future missions with aerial platforms tremendously,” Aung said.

The team isn’t sure how the helicopter’s mission will end. Ingenuity was designed to last just 30 Martian days. The new support phase will extend its mission by another 30 days, unless something goes wrong before then. “We don’t know how many freeze and thaw cycles it can go through before something breaks,” said Ingenuity chief engineer Bob Balaram. More