That's because on an average, the light from the planet See that the brightness of the planet remains almost at constant. Until both of these, the planet and the star Twinkling the same amount because I copy pasted them. You can actually note that all these dots are Then we'll zoom outĪnd we'll look at them. Going to twinkle the same way, pretty much the same way. I have copied this twinkling dot and pasted it over here several times. Other dot becomes bright and as a result, when we lookĪt the planet as a whole, the overall brightness doesn't change much or doesn't fluctuate much. And so, each of these dots will twinkle, just like a star butīecause we have many dots, when one of these dots become dim, some other dot will become bright. The stars are the single dot, but we can assume that planets are made up of many such dots. Much bigger in the sky compared to the stars, we can assume the planets are Telescope and look at them, then starts would still look like a dot, but planets well we canĪctually make out their shape, if you're looking at Saturn weĬould actually see the rings of the Saturn and so on. That with our naked eyes, if you had to use a That's because the planetsĪre much closer to us. Like a dot in the sky but if you would look at a planet, a planet actually appears So here is the star, a star pretty much looks Twinkling effect of the planets because planets appearīigger in size to us. Outside your atmosphere does twinkle due to theĮffect that we discussed. Outside our atmosphere, anything we're looking at So the next question is, why don't planets twinkle? The answer is the planets The continuous changes in the atmosphere,įluctuations in the temperature and density and all the other things, because the light isĬontinuously changing its path, the rays that reach ourĮyes continuously changes and as a result the brightness Rays reaching our eyes, the star is gonna look a little bit dim. Moment, instead of five, only four rays reach our eyes. Rays slightly bend away, missing our eyes. The path taken by this light changes a little bit and as a result, let's say that one of these So let's say this is our eyesĪs you're looking at that star and currently let's sayĪbout five rays of light are reaching our eyes and because of this we are seeing, right now, the star to be as brightĪs we can see over here, but because the atmospheric conditions are continuously changing with time, maybe the very next moment But why exactly? What happens if the light bends? Well, let's zoom in a little further. Take a little different path and this causes the stars to twinkle. So the bending is not the same, the very next moment it might Path taken by the Light also slightly keeps changing. Temperature and the density of the air it's continuousįluctuating even with time, it changes with time continuously and as a result the One layer to another, there is changes in the temperature, there is changes in the density, there's pollution and dust particles and because of this the lightĬontinuously keeps changing its speed as it movesįrom one layer to another and as a result lightĬontinuously keeps refracting or bending as it moves towards us. This happens because the light is passing through several layers of our atmosphere and as it passes from In and look at the light as it travels through our atmosphere, then we would see that as it travels down towards the Earth surface, light doesn't bend, lightĭoesn't travel in a straight line where it continuously keeps bending. So what causes the twinkling effect? Well, if we were to zoom This effect is greater when the stars are closer to the horizonīecause the rays of light pass through a larger So the first effect of the atmosphere, is that it shifts the Higher in the sky and so when we look at the star, we don't see over here, we're going to see it a little bit higher. When we look at the star, it appears to us as if these rays of light are coming from somewhere Result it refracts, it bends and because of this bending It slows down as itĮnters into our atmosphere just a little bit and as a First, as the light entersįrom space into the atmosphere, it's going to bend a little bit and this happens because the Now, due to our atmosphere, there are two things Over here on Earth, looking at this star. So let's explore how this atmosphere makes all the stars twinkle at us. 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. Why don't planets twinkle? The stars only twinkleĭue to our atmosphere and we know this because Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, why do the stars twinkle at us and planets don't twinkle.
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