The contamination of optical astronomical images with bright trails from satellite megaconstellations such as SpaceX’s Starlink has been well documented. Radio interference from the same satellites is also a significant issue, because although they transmit data at designated frequencies in the range 10.7–12.7 GHz, the satellites’ electronics have been observed to leak into lower-frequency bands used for astronomy. Despite this prior knowledge, it appears that leakage from the second generation of Starlink satellites, which commenced operations around 18 months ago, has not been improved: Cees Bassa and colleagues use data from the LOFAR radio telescope to show that they unintentionally leak in much the same way as earlier generations, but up to 32 times more strongly than previously seen.

The LOFAR telescope observed more than 200 fly-overs of Starlink satellites of various generations with its low-band (10–88 MHz) and high-band (110–188 MHz) antennas. In high-band observations, detected signals from second-generation Starlinks appeared distinctly different from those of earlier generations, with significantly brighter broadband emission that reached approximately 100 Jy. At low-band frequencies, emission from the v2 satellites reached power flux densities of approximately 1,300 Jy. Earlier Starlink versions were not detected at all in the low band.

来自 SpaceX 的 Starlink 等巨型卫星星座的明亮轨迹对光学天文图像的污染已得到充分证明。来自同一颗卫星的无线电干扰也是一个重要问题，因为尽管它们在 10.7-12.7 GHz 范围内的指定频率传输数据，但已观察到卫星的电子设备泄漏到用于天文学的较低频段。尽管有这些先验知识，但大约 18 个月前开始运行的第二代 Starlink 卫星的泄漏似乎并没有得到改善：Cees Bassa 和同事使用来自 LOFAR 射电望远镜的数据表明，它们无意中的泄漏方式与前几代大致相同，但比以前看到的强烈程度高 32 倍。

LOFAR 望远镜使用其低频段 （10-88 MHz） 和高频段 （110-188 MHz） 天线观测了 200 多次不同代的 Starlink 卫星的飞越。在高频段观测中，来自第二代星链的探测信号似乎与前几代信号明显不同，宽带发射明显更亮，达到约 100 Jy。在低频段频率下，v2 卫星的发射达到了大约 1,300 Jy 的功率通量密度。在低频段根本没有检测到早期的 Starlink 版本。