It also depends upon the condition that happens in the air above you at any given time. To prevent twinkling, it doesn’t take much of an apparent disk. This will result in the light from the star as a zig-zag movement as they come close to our eyes making it appear to twinkle.Ī little bit of more apparent disk will take a lot more bending of the incoming light for the rays from all parts of the disk to get bent away from your direction so that large objects would appear to blink momentarily and so appear to twinkle. If it were to be perfectly still, the light from the star would follow a straight path, and the star's image would have appeared stable.īut in reality, the atmosphere is always moving, and winds at every level will cause slight differences to shift around, and different densities bend light at different amounts. In other words, the air above us is like a big ocean and is not very dense fluid, which has a small bending effect on light that passes through it. The atmospheric refraction causes the twinkling of the stars. You can visualize that light moves in a zig- zag path instead of a straight path to your eyes in case the Earth didn't have an atmosphere.Įxplain the Phenomenon of Twinkling of Stars Once the light from a star enters the Earth's atmosphere, each of its rays get refracted, causing a slight change in the direction due to various temperature and density layers of the atmosphere. Even when viewed with the help of a large telescope, they appear as pinpoints easily disturbed by the Earth's atmosphere. However, getting big telescopes into space is very hard.Twinkling of stars is due to the large distance between them and Earth. Well, space is the best place to see a star without a twinkle. This is because it blurs the things we want to see, like distant galaxies.
While twinkling looks pretty, astronomers find it very annoying.
The stars’ twinkling shows how the winds are moving, which can really help when predicting weather - like really hot days. Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders have been observing the twinkling of stars for thousands of years. Since the hot and cold layers of air keep moving, the bending of the light changes too, which causes the star’s appearance to wobble or twinkle.
Pir6mon/wikimediaĪs light from a star races through our atmosphere, it bounces and bumps through the different layers, bending the light before you see it. These waves can create really cool cloud patterns like this near the Moul n'ga Cirque in Southeast Algeria. Air can be pushed up as it passes above mountains and hills, creating waves in the atmosphere.
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