Why do stars twinkle?
Answers
Explanation:
As light from a star races through our atmosphere, it bounces and bumps through the different layers, bending the light before you see it. 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.
As light from a star races through our atmosphere, it bounces and bumps through the different layers, bending the light before you see it. 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.
Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders have been observing the twinkling of stars for thousands of years. The stars’ twinkling shows how the winds are moving, which can really help when predicting weather - like really hot days.
Correcting the twinkle
While twinkling looks pretty, astronomers find it very annoying. This is because it blurs the things we want to see, like distant galaxies.
What can we do about this?
Well, space is the best place to see a star without a twinkle. However, getting big telescopes into space is very hard.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope snapped this photo of hundreds of thousands of stars lurking in the Milky Way Galaxy, thanks to its infrared photography equipment. NASA/JPL-Caltech
We can build big telescopes on the ground that use lasers and bendable mirrors - bending the mirrors to match the twinkling starlight. This then shows us the whole universe, as if the atmosphere vanished above us!
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