Light pollution hides Milky Way from one-third of Earth’s population
More than one-third of the Earth’s population can no longer see the Milky Way, even on the clearest night, due to the luminous glow of light pollution in most of our skies, a new study reveals.
According to the new world atlas of artificial night-sky brightness created by a team of scientists, almost 80 percent of inhabitants of North America and about 60 percent of European dwellers cannot see the luminous band of our galaxy, which has been a familiar nocturnal sight for the eons of human existence.
The state-of-the-art study, whose results were published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, also showed that around 83 percent of the people on the Earth, including over 99 percent of those living in Europe and the US, live in areas polluted by artificial lights at night time.
According to the study, Singapore is the most affected country, where “the entire population lives under skies so bright that the eye cannot fully dark-adapt to night vision.”
In contrast, there are countries like Chad, the Central African Republic and Madagascar, whose skies are so pristine and ink-black that they let the people underneath perceive the majestic views of the Milky Way at night.
“It is surprising how in a few decades of lighting growth we have enveloped most of humanity in a curtain of light that hides the view of the greatest wonder of nature: the universe itself,” said Fabio Falchi of the Light Pollution Science and Technology Institute in Italy, and the lead author of the atlas.
“Our civilization's roots are connected to the night sky in every field, from literature to art to philosophy to religion and, of course, to science,” he added.
To create the atlas of light pollution, scientists combined satellite data with those obtained from the ground and computer models of how light gets scattered in the atmosphere.
“Countries even as large as Italy or Spain or France or Germany do not have any single spot in their territory with a pristine night sky,” Falchi further said.
According to the atlas, just some small regions in Europe, mostly in Scotland, Sweden and Norway, have remained relatively intact by nocturnal light pollution, and the least-affected of all the Earth’s continents are Australia and Africa.
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