Question

Why do stars twinkle but not the planets?
A 3 mark answer please!

Answer 1

Answer:

The stars only twinkle due to our atmosphere and we know this because if you look at the stars from outside our atmosphere like the astronauts on the space station, they don't see the stars twinkling at all.

hope it helps ✌️ DHA

Answer 2

Explanation:

Stars twinkle because … they’re so far away from Earth that, even through large telescopes, they appear only as pinpoints. And it’s easy for Earth’s atmosphere to disturb the pinpoint light of a star. As a star’s light pierces our atmosphere, each single stream of starlight is refracted – caused to change direction, slightly – by the various temperature and density layers in Earth’s atmosphere. You might think of it as the light traveling a zig-zag path to our eyes, instead of the straight path the light would travel if Earth didn’t have an atmosphere.

Planets shine more steadily because … they’re closer to Earth and so appear not as pinpoints, but as tiny disks in our sky. You can see planets as disks if you looked through a telescope, while stars remain pinpoints. The light from these little disks is also refracted by Earth’s atmosphere, as it travels toward our eyes. But – while the light from one edge of a planet’s disk might be forced to “zig” one way – light from the opposite edge of the disk might be “zagging” in an opposite way. The zigs and zags of light from a planetary disk cancel each other out, and that’s why planets appear to shine steadily.