Why Do Stars Twinkle?
SciShow explains why stars do that twinkling that all the kids are singing about, and explains how astronomers can get around it to make observations, and why ...
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Lots of kids grow up singing that tune about little stars twinkling, but even as adults, many folks don’t know why stars seem to flicker and wiggle. Astronomers describe the twinkling of the stars as stellar scintillation. Technically, it refers to variations in apparent brightness or position of a distant, luminous object as its light travels through a medium. In other words, that twinkling isn’t caused by the stars which are super constant in their brightness -- it’s caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. As the light from a star travels toward you through the atmosphere, it passes through many layers of air of varying temperatures and densities. Each of the boundaries between those layers of air refract the light, bending it in a slightly different direction from moment to moment....
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Lots of kids grow up singing that tune about little stars twinkling, but even as adults, many folks don’t know why stars seem to flicker and wiggle. Astronomers describe the twinkling of the stars as stellar scintillation. Technically, it refers to variations in apparent brightness or position of a distant, luminous object as its light travels through a medium. In other words, that twinkling isn’t caused by the stars which are super constant in their brightness -- it’s caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. As the light from a star travels toward you through the atmosphere, it passes through many layers of air of varying temperatures and densities. Each of the boundaries between those layers of air refract the light, bending it in a slightly different direction from moment to moment....
