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Light pollution isn't just bad for stargazing: Why some towns are embracing darkness

There are currently 38 official Dark Sky Communities around the world. Here's why they matter.

Photo by Khamkéo Vilaysing on Unsplash

Dark skies are good for people and the planet.

In the 17th century, the wealthy people of Scotland would escape to the small town of Moffat for its healing sulfurous springs. Today, people appreciate Moffat for another kind of healing escape…into darkness.

That's right. The healing power of the dark of night is a thing, not only for people but for the planet.

If you've ever had the bounty of sitting out under the stars far away from city lights, you know how magical it can be to gaze at the night sky, but there are benefits to natural darkness that go far beyond enjoying the aesthetic beauty of space. That's the premise behind Dark Sky Communities.

Moffat became an official Dark Sky Community in 2016 after it invested in changing the town's lighting to prevent light pollution. Now it's an ideal place for stargazing, with a community observatory housing a state-of-the-art telescope and townspeople dedicated to preserving the night sky. Moffat was one of the first Dark Sky Communities in Europe and is one of just 38 around the world as of January 2023.

What exactly is a Dark Sky Community and why does it matter?

The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) began designating places around the world, from natural environments to cities and towns, as Dark Sky Places in 2001 as a way of recognizing "excellent stewardship of the night sky." Dark Sky Places preserve and protect the dark through responsible lighting policies and public education about the importance of reducing light pollution. A Dark Sky Community is a legally organized city or town that adopts outdoor lighting ordinances that reduce light pollution and undertakes efforts to educate residents about the importance of dark skies.

Darkness matters—a lot. Not only does light pollution make it harder to see the beauty of the night sky, but it also has a negative effect on wildlife and ecosystems. Many animals, from insects to migratory birds to nocturnal animals rely on the natural rhythm of sunlight and darkness, and artificial light can disrupt their natural behaviors, sometimes to deadly effect. Light pollution also has a detrimental impact on plants, disrupting the circadian rhythm of certain pollinators and leading to reduced plant-pollinator interactions.

Too much artificial light at night can impact human health as well, as light messes with our own circadian rhythms. It's also just a waste of energy when lights are left on unnecessarily. The IDA estimates that around 30% of outdoor lighting is wasted, just in the U.S. alone. The Artificial Light at Night (ALAN) Research Literature Database provides a wealth of scientific literature on all aspects of artificial light at night research.

But as much as science tells us about the importance of reducing light pollution, there's also what the IDA refers to as our "night sky heritage."

milky way, stars, night sky

The night sky has inspired scientists and poets alike throughout human history.

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The IDA website explains:

"Until recently, for all of human history, our ancestors experienced a sky brimming with stars—a night sky that inspired science, religion, philosophy, art and literature, including some of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets.

The natural night sky is our common and universal heritage, yet it’s rapidly becoming unknown to the newest generations.

Van Gogh painted his famous “Starry Night” in Saint Rémy, France, in 1889. Now, the Milky Way can no longer be seen from there. If he were alive today, would he still be inspired to paint “Starry Night”?

Experiencing the night sky provides perspective, inspiration, and leads us to reflect on our humanity and place in the universe. The history of scientific discovery and even human curiosity itself is indebted to the natural night sky.

Without the natural night sky we could not have:

  • Navigated the globe
  • Walked on the Moon
  • Learned of our expanding universe
  • Discovered that humans are made of stardust"

Our relationship with natural darkness is both practical and poetic, but in a world full of lights and screens, most of us probably don't it as much thought or care as we should. That's the whole purpose of naming and certifying Dark Sky Places.

The IDA shares that as of January 2023, there are 201 certified Dark Sky Places in the world, including 115 Parks, 38 Communities, 20 Reserves, 16 Sanctuaries, 6 Urban Night Sky Places, and 6 Dark Sky Friendly Developments of Distinction.

You can find the list of Dark Sky Communities here and an interactive map of all official Dark Sky Places here.

Let's all do our part to turn off lights and limit light pollution for the good of people and our planet.


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Heroes

What you can't see in this photo? Galaxy 4889’s massive black hole.

Now that's a very big black hole.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

A black hole had been "feasting" on its region's "cosmic cuisine" (NASA's words, not mine). This is what that insatiable black hole looks like.

Yes, that's just a black box. Because black holes are invisible, remember? (OK, I'll cut it out.)

This particular black hole — which is no longer dining on space matter and is instead resting comfortably in a food coma — is seriously enormous ... even by huge things in space standards.

This supermassive black hole in galaxy NGC 4889 is one of the largest NASA has ever discovered.

NASA originally spotted the black hole — which is a whopping 21 billion times the mass of our sun— in 2011.

The Hubble Space Telescope, however, just released an image of NGC 4889 hanging out roughly 300 million light-years away — the brightest dot in the center of the pic below. And even though you can't see the actual black hole within in (remember: invisible), the image is bringing a renewed interest in the galaxy's gargantuan gravitational center.

Photo by NASA & ESA.

To put this black hole's mass into perspective, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way (the galaxy we're spinning around in this very moment) has a mass about 4 million times our sun's. That's right — NGC 4889's black hole has a mass more than 5,000 times greater than our galaxy's black hole.

How do we know for sure how big it is if we can't see it? A very smart person who knows a lot about space noted on Hubble's website that astronomers can estimate the mass of black holes by measuring the velocity of stars moving around a galaxy's center — sort of like how you can't see the wind, but you can tell how hard it's blowing by seeing its effects on Donald Trump's hair.

Learning about this huge black hole made me realize two things: 1. I am terrified of black holes, and 2. I know very little about them.

So I decided to do some digging. And let me tell you — black holes are fascinating. Here are three facts that blew me away (or sucked me in?).

1. The tiniest black holes can be about the size of an atom ... but can have the mass of a f***ing mountain.

Black holes are like people — they come in all sizes.

An artist illustration of a quasar, or feeding black hole, eating up the space matter surrounding it. Image by NASA/ESAvia Getty Images.

There are three different kinds of black holes, mass-wise: primordial, stellar, and supermassive. The latter is the largest, with masses greater than 1 million of our suns. Evidence suggests they're at the center of every large galaxy.

Stellars (the Average Joes of black holes, if you will) are everywhere, relatively speaking — there could even be dozens floating around our very own Milky Way. These form after very big stars collapse, and they have masses up to 20 times greater than our sun.

Primordial black holes — the little guys of the group that formed in the early universe — can be as small as an atom but have the mass of a mountain. (Because science.)

2. Black holes are terrifying, but no — we shouldn't fear getting sucked into one.

Despite how bewilderingly scary the thought of one can be — their very definition hinges on the fact their gravity is so strong that not even light can escape — there are no black holes large enough to threaten Earth's existence anywhere nearby.

And as NASA points out, "black holes do not wander around the universe, randomly swallowing worlds." (Thank God.)

Bright flares are seen near Sagittarius A* — the black hole in the center of our own Milky Way galaxy — in 2003. Photo by NASA/CXC/MIT/F.K.Baganoff/Getty Images.

We should maybe focus on more reasonable threats facing our very existence as a species, like, say, climate change? (Just a thought.)

3. Black holes can collide. And we just learned that we can hear it happening — even a billion light-years away.

It turns out, Alert Einstein was right this whole time.

Photo by AFP/Getty Images.

Just this month, scientists from across the globe published a report that helps prove the last leg of Einstein's theory of relatively, which had to do with gravitational waves — "the ripples in the fabric of space-time," as The New York Times defined them (try wrapping your head around that).

Back in September 2015, scientists at the LIGO Scientific Collaboration detected a "chirp" using their antennas in Washington state and Louisiana. That chirp was the stretching and compressing of space — gravitational waves hitting Earth's surface.

So what do these waves have to do with black holes? Well, black holes created them.

Two stellar black holes had merged about a billion light-years away. This sent gravitational waves throughout the universe, distorting space-time as they rippled through. So, yes — two black holes that fused in one-fifth of an Earth second a billion years ago led to what could be "one of the major breakthroughs" in modern physics on Earth in 2016.


Do you feel like a black hole expert now?

OK, so maybe not an expert, but at least a little smarter when it comes to space stuff?

Black holes can be super-small and supermassive. They're completely horrifying by default but actually pose no real threat. And, as of just this month, they helped back up the most questionable aspect of Einstein's theory of relatively.

Bottom line: Black holes are a lot of things, starting with insanely cool.

Heroes

Hidden behind our own galaxy are clues to a mystery of epic proportions.

Like a pedestrian who is walking one mile per hour slower than everyone around them; like a person who is standing in the exact middle of an escalator; like a driver who doesn't understand the left lane is for merging: Our galaxy is in the way.

Image from Mike Durkin/Flickr.

What exactly is the Milky Way hiding?

Don't get me wrong, the Milky Way is really cool and super pretty. It's home to at least 200 million stars and has fascinated people for centuries. It's nearly as old as the universe itself. As pretty as it is, all that dust, gas, and stars block our view of what's behind it.

Astronomers even have a term for this — the Zone of Avoidance.

The ultimate photobomb. Image from Andrew Xu/Wikimedia Commons.

Scientists have finally found a way to peer through the Zone of Avoidance — and what they saw on the other side is astounding.

An artist’s impression of the galaxies found in the "Zone of Avoidance" behind the Milky Way. Image by ICRAR, used with permission.

In order to peek through the zone of avoidance, scientists didn't use regular telescopes, they used radio telescopes, specifically the Parkes Observatory radio telescope in New South Wales, Australia.

Through the radio telescope, scientists were able to observe nearly 900 galaxies — 240 of which had never been seen before.

The Parkes telescope is over 200 feet across. Image from Stephen West/Wikimedia Commons.

Unlike the kind of telescopes that show you visible light waves, radio telescopes look at radio waves, which can penetrate through the gas and dust of our galaxy, giving scientists a kind of X-ray vision. 

An annotated artist's impression showing radio waves travelling from the new galaxies, then passing through the Milky Way and arriving at the Parkes radio telescope on Earth (not to scale). Image by ICRAR, used with permission.

Unfortunately, this means there isn't a big beautiful photo to share showing what the new galaxies in the Zone of Avoidance look like. All the pictures from the radio telescope kinda look like this: 

Ooooh! Ahhhh! GIF via ICRAR/Vimeo.

While perhaps not as cool as a full color, high-res, high-def photo of hundreds of new galaxies, these radio wave pictures could go a long way in helping scientists solve one of space's biggest mysteries. 

Because there is something hiding out there. Something big.​ No one knows what it is — but we know it's there. And with these new radio wave pictures, we're getting closer to figuring it out.

No, it's not "The Guardians of the Galaxy" sequel. 

Image from BagoGames/Flickr.

For now, it's called the Great Attractor.

Our galaxy, along with its neighbors, are all hurtling through space at 14 million miles per hour toward one particular point on the universal map — something astronomers call the Great Attractor. Whatever it is, it's huge and has the gravitational force of a million-billion suns.

And nobody knows what it is.

Though we've had evidence about it since the 1970s, the Great Attractor is hidden in that same Zone of Avoidance that was blocking our view of these recently discovered galaxies.

So are these recently discovered galaxies the Great Attractor? Or are they just one more piece of the puzzle?

Maybe? It's not clear at the moment.

“An average galaxy contains 100 billion stars," astronomer Professor Renée Kraan-Korteweg said in a press release. "So finding hundreds of new galaxies hidden behind the Milky Way points to a lot of mass we didn't know about until now.”

That said, scientists need to do follow-up studies to see if the new galaxies measure up or whether there's still something else out there.

The fact is, there's still a ton of stuff out there for us to find.

The universe is huge, and though we have some awesome tools and awesome people exploring it, there are still big mysterious things out there for us to discover. And that's pretty cool.

GIF from "Mystery Men."

Heroes

Why the stars in this photo have been fooling us Earthlings all along.

This may look like one galaxy, but looks can be deceiving.

About 230 million light-years away, something pretty remarkable is happening in the constellation Hercules.

Well, at least it was happening 230 million years ago ... you know how messy time and distance get when you're talkin' space stuff.

GIF from "Doctor Who."

I say it's "happening" because — despite what the photo below may imply — you're not actually looking at a singular object or spacial body, but rather, "utter chaos," as Gizmodo described it.

This picture captures galaxy NGC 6052, which is actually two completely different galaxies colliding.

Photo by European Space Agency/Hubble & NASA, Judy Schmidt.

The photo, snapped by NASA and the European Space Agency's (ESA) Hubble Telescope, was shared online on Dec. 30, 2015, and has since sent the Internet abuzz.

Here's a snippet of what the space groups had to say about NGC 6052:

"It would be reasonable to think of this as a single abnormal galaxy, and it was originally classified as such. However, it is in fact a 'new' galaxy in the process of forming. Two separate galaxies have been gradually drawn together, attracted by gravity, and have collided. We now see them merging into a single structure."

That’s right — gravity is pulling together two galaxies we previously thought were just one uniquely formed galaxy. (Verrry sneaky, NGC 6052.)

As you might expect, this process is causing major changes for those galaxies' stars and the planets that revolve around them, which are being (or will be) thrown out of their orbits and cast into brand new ones.

When the new galaxy finally settles down, the newly formed arrangement may not even resemble either of the two formers.

The craziest thing about what's happening over in Hercules? It'll be happening right here to our Milky Way, too.

Galaxy mergers are fairly common throughout the universe, as Space.com pointed out. And, in about 4 billion years, we'll have some firsthand experience with the phenomenon, too — well, you know ... assuming humans are still around then. (What year would that be? 4000002016?)

As I type, our galaxy, the Milky Way, is on a collision course with our neighbor Andromeda.

This is what the beginning stages of that merger will look like, according to NASA:

Illustration of what the Andromeda (left) and Milky Way (right) collision is expected to look like right before the encounter — about 3.75 billion years from now. Photo illustration by NASA; ESA; Z. Levay, and R. van der Marel, STScl; T. Hallas and A. Mellinger.

So ... should you be freaking out right now? Nah. Not only will this happen way past our lifetimes, but the verdict's still out on if Earth would even be affected that much — as dramatic as the above pic may appear.

"It is likely the sun will be flung into a new region of our galaxy," NASA explained. "But our Earth and solar system are in no danger of being destroyed."

The main takeaway? Galaxies may come and go...

...but space science will be cool forever.

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