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Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
cdarwin@c.im ("Chuck Darwin") wrote:
Astronomers spent decades designing the Square Kilometre Array Low
(SKA-Low) to hear the faintest whisper in the observable universe
— neutral hydrogen signals from the cosmic dawn,
when the first stars flickered on roughly 13 billion years ago.What they’re picking up instead is electronic leakage from SpaceX satellites.
-- Not the broadband beams Starlink intentionally transmits.
-- The accidental static bleeding from onboard hardware, coupling through satellite structures and radiating across frequencies nobody authorized.
A Curtin University team using the Engineering Development Array 2
— a prototype SKA-Low station in Australia
— analyzed approximately 76 million radio images over 29 days.The results, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, are uncomfortable reading.
Researchers catalogued 112,534 individual radio emissions from 1,806 unique Starlink satellites across 73–235 MHz,
the exact frequency range SKA-Low needs.Some satellites emit periodic 13-kHz tones at roughly 137 MHz every 100 seconds.
These aren’t scheduled downlinks that operators can plan around. They’re unpredictable hardware leakage
— and researchers cannot subtract a signal they cannot model.Current ITU regulations ignore unintended satellite hardware leakage, leaving astronomers without legal protection.