This issue astronomers have with Starlink is not with increased light pollution per se, where the effect is negligible, but with the fact that when there are 10,000 of these in the sky at one time, it will be much more difficult to point a telescope and not have one of your exposures contaminated by a Starlink satellite passing through. Some telescopes will sit on a source for hours for the faintest objects and the odds of encountering one of these becomes worrisome.
Anything visible to the naked eye or even binoculars is honking bright to modern astronomical telescsopes, which are sensitive to sources millions of times fainter. Even if they're not directly in the field, off-axis reflections and glints can contaminate exposures. A train of these moving through the field would be a total disaster.
For those saying let's just build space-based telescopes, sure, but it's 10-100X more expensive, and even modest ground-based facilities produce 100GB/night these days, and you can't do that from space (yet).
If there is one within 1 AU of the Sun at any given time, then there are ~10^16 of them within a sphere out to the nearest star. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's teeming or not.
Co-author here. We obtained spectroscopic measurements of 'Oumuamua, and its surface closely matches D-type asteroids and comet nuclei, which are dark, reddish and organic-rich.
Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 in 1994. The comet had been captured decades earlier after entering Jupiter's Roche limit and was actually in orbit around Jupiter.
Collisions in the main asteroid belt have been observed, but only after impact. The signature is a puff of dust from the impact that fades after hours or days as the dust spreads. The statistics are imprecise, but collisions between kilometer-scale asteroids might have decades or hundreds of years between them.
Impacts are rare though. There's a reason they call it space. If you were standing on an asteroid in the main belt, the nearest asteroid to you would be so far away that you could not see it.
Anything visible to the naked eye or even binoculars is honking bright to modern astronomical telescsopes, which are sensitive to sources millions of times fainter. Even if they're not directly in the field, off-axis reflections and glints can contaminate exposures. A train of these moving through the field would be a total disaster.
For those saying let's just build space-based telescopes, sure, but it's 10-100X more expensive, and even modest ground-based facilities produce 100GB/night these days, and you can't do that from space (yet).