Satellite Struck
First published in the print column, The Nature of Things
Well it’s official: we’re definitely in the throes of the dog days of summer. And if you are someone who doesn’t have to work outside in the sweltering heat of late, consider yourself a lucky dog.
The phrase “dog days” dates back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who kept track of the seasons by watching the sky. The star Sirius was known as the "dog star" because it made up the nose of a constellation shaped like a dog. When Sirius would appear in the sky just before the sun, near the end of July, that marked the beginning of the very hottest days of the year. The Romans referred to this period as “dies caniculares” or “days of the dog star,” which was eventually translated as just “dog days.” They believed the heat from Sirius and the sun combined is what made these days the hottest of the year, and also a period that could bring fever, bad luck or catastrophe.
Those ancient civilizations’ predictions don’t quite work for our modern times any more. First, because the Earth’s rotation wobbles, Sirius does not appear in the sky at the same time of year as it did back then. In fact, according to the Farmer’s Almanac, the modern dog days now last 40 days from July 3 - August 11.
The second reason those Greek astronomers’ predictions would be thrown off in today’s world is because we now have thousands of celestial bodies floating around out there that aren’t stars at all.
Between Elon Musk’s Starlink project and rival companies Oneweb and Viasat—all of which are trying to establish satellite internet service for the planet—we now have tens of thousands of satellites orbiting “low-earth.”
Other satellites orbit the earth at a distance of about 621 miles; these internet satellites are orbiting at about half that distance, so they are very visible in the night sky. Astronomers are already complaining about the streaks of light they make on telescope images because they block the view of stars and planets, not to mention the many near-misses they’ve already had with other vessels, including China’s space station.
Apparently, we just can’t help ourselves from trashing every corner of our living space. It’s not enough that we’re pouring poison into the ground and calling it modern agriculture, burning fossil fuels at a rate that’s throwing an already touchy carbon balance into a tailspin, and shipping giant barges of trash, daily, out to sea. We now feel the need to junk up space, too.
The other day my son—who holds Elon Musk in high esteem—asked my opinion of Musk’s ambitions to make Mars an inhabitable planet.
My response was, we don’t deserve a fresh start somewhere else when we were given everything we need to prosper right here, and we still haven’t learned how to play nice, share resources, and not screw up everything we touch in the arrogant assumption that we can improve on nature.
Assuming we don’t somehow cause the planet to spontaneously implode, the earth’s rotation will continue to wobble and one day, thousands of years from now, Sirius will rise with the sun during January instead of July, and we will have the “dog days of winter.”
The question is, will we even be able to detect Sirius amongst the junk?
No worries. I hear the view is better from Mars.
