• Question: Why do some stars appear to twinkle?

    Asked by anon-335301 on 5 Oct 2022.
    • Photo: Ben Dryer

      Ben Dryer answered on 5 Oct 2022:


      Hi! Think about standing in some shallow water and looking at something under the water – as the water moves, ripples, or has waves, the object you are looking at looks like it’s moving, because light moves differently through the water depending on the waves or ripples. The same thing happens with light from stars, the light passes through our atmosphere, which is a lot like a liquid, it moves around and has waves caused pressure and heat differences. These disturbances cause the light from the star to take different paths and that’s why stars twinkle.

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