THE song goes “Twinkle twinkle little star…” Ever wonder what is the cause of the twinkling of stars?
Stars twinkle because we view them through our atmosphere. Seen from the moon, where there is no atmosphere, stars do not twinkle at all, but here on Earth starlight passes through many miles of air on its way to our eyes. A ray of starlight bends slightly each time it enters warmer or cooler air, [ihc-hide-content ihc_mb_type=”show” ihc_mb_who=”2,3,5″ ihc_mb_template=”1″ ]and this happens frequently as the ray passes through the atmosphere. Each temperature zone is something like a bubble of warmer or cooler air, and they are usually rising and falling, which means that the path of the starlight is constantly and randomly shifting, we see that unsteady shifting as twinkling.
Unlike the sun, stars are so far away that they look like dimensionless points to us, so their rays of light reach our eyes in a very narrow beam, as that thin beam twitches, the star twinkles.
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