(ORDO NEWS) — If you look at the night sky, you can see a lot of twinkling stars! But why do some blink, but, for example, Mars or the Sun do not?
The stars sparkling in the dark sky are an incredibly beautiful sight. It is a pity that today this phenomenon can be seen less and less due to light pollution.
The sun is a star, but we don’t see how it flickers. Why do all the other stars in the night sky twinkle? Simple answer: it’s all about the distance.
Stars twinkle because they are far away from Earth, so as starlight travels through the atmosphere, it is refracted countless times, making them appear to blink.
The Sun, the closest star to Earth, is about 150 million kilometers away, which is 0.0000158 light years away. However, if you do not take into account the Sun, then the other “nearest” star is about 4.22 light years from Earth!
Meanwhile, the Earth’s atmosphere is so turbulent that images of all objects in the sky tend to “float”. In other words, the refraction of light rays in the atmosphere causes the stars to blink.
In addition, in different parts of the planet in the atmosphere, various phenomena occur with forming, swirling and dissipating flows and vortices.
In each layer of the earth’s atmosphere, air moves in different directions with different intensity. As light from stars travels through the atmosphere, it is bent by refraction, so stars don’t always look the same, even at the same point in the world.
Why don’t planets twinkle?
The planets of our solar system are relatively close to us, although they look very small. Due to the proximity of the planets to the Earth, the light from these celestial bodies does not bend as much due to the Earth’s atmosphere.
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