A fascinating sight, or why do the stars twinkle?

The night starry sky always causes special feelings, often all earthly affairs become unimportant, and a person begins to feel a small part of a huge universe, part of something more than just a planet Earth.

And why do the stars twinkle? Probably, many asked themselves this question. An incredibly beautiful sight, especially after the rain, when the stars shimmer with all the colors of the rainbow. People do not always know what to answer such a seemingly childish question.

Simple answer to a simple question

Star flicker is caused directly by air vibrations. In connection with the heterogeneity of the Earth's atmosphere, air masses move with unequal speed, with the formation of real currents and flows, different in temperature properties, density and other parameters. Therefore, the stellar light passing through the atmosphere can be refracted in many different ways. Here comes the likeness of this mysterious flicker.

Shimmering Star

The shimmering star in the sky is like the spark of a big city, if you look at it from afar. And if the air is saturated with moisture, then the glow will change its trajectory and be refracted, shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow. The answer to the question of why the stars twinkle turns out to be so simple. When the star starts to approach the horizon line, the refraction occurs even more intensively due to the thickness of the air, thereby making the flicker more distinct.

Can the planets flicker?

Stars differ from planets in a huge number of physical characteristics, it's no wonder that these people of the cosmos shine in different ways. Even on a beautiful night with a lot of flickering stars, you can clearly distinguish the light emanating from the planets of the solar system. Their light can be described as equal, constant. Like the moon or the sun, they do not flicker. This can be seen even without an accurate microscope.

Why is this happening? If we take into account the factors that the stars light, like the light of the planet, should be refracted in the layers of the atmosphere, we can conclude that the stars flicker pointwise, the planet does the same, but due to the fact that there are many such points, an illusion of an even Sveta. It's all about quantity.

Such different stars

If you look at the stars with the naked eye, then they all seem almost identical, different only in brightness. But this is far from being so, if you look more closely, you can distinguish stars even by color. This applies to the biggest and brightest stars. For example, the stars Arcturus and Aldebaran are orange, while Betelgeuse and Antares are red. White is called Sirius and Vega, white with a blue tint - Speka and Regulus. There are even yellow giants Capella and Alpha Centauri.

Astronomers associate the color of stars with a parameter such as temperature. Relatively cool are red stars with a surface temperature of up to 4 thousand degrees, the hottest are called white and blue, reaching an incredible temperature of 10-30 thousand degrees Celsius! It becomes quite clear why the stars twinkle, with such temperature data they are capable of much.

Why do stars twinkle and flicker at all? The answer to this question depends on how you look at it. If this process is identified with refraction, then it can be called a flicker. But, as is known, the stars themselves do not shine, just such an impression is formed by the viewer, who is watching this interesting phenomenon from the Earth. If you contemplate this picture from space, then there will be no flicker. According to the astronauts, the stars glow brightly, smoothly, and they wink only to those observing that they remained on Earth.