Why do the stars twinkle?
Reason Behind Twinkling Stars
What is a star?
“A star is an astronomical object consisting of a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but due to their immense distance from Earth they appear as fixed points of light in the sky”.
Stars are huge celestial bodies made generally of hydrogen and helium that produce light and warmth from the stirring atomic forges inside their centre.
We see sparkling stars from Earth because they’re so distant from Earth that, even through enormous telescopes, they show up just as pinpoints. Also, Earth’s atmosphere disturbs the pinpoint light of stars. As a star’s light pierces our atmosphere, each single stream of starlight is refracted – caused to vary direction, slightly, because of the varied temperature and also because of the density layers in Earth’s atmosphere.
One can notice that there are different types of starts which twinkle more and there are few starts that does not appear us to twinkle a lot the reason behind this is that the stars which are closer to the horizon twinkle more and the reason why other starts don’t twinkle more is they are high above the ground and there is a lot more atmosphere between the human standing in the earth and seeing the start.
One might also wonder why planets don’t shine. The reason why we don’t see planets shining is that the light from those planets gets through the environment in a lot thicker pillar than that from a star – and that thicker bar is a lot harder to thump around.
– Written by Nehal Rathi
