Why do stars twinkle activity

This effect is reproduced in this demonstration, showing why stars appear to act in this manner. The twinkling effect is mainly due to turbulence in Earth's atmosphere. The different temperatures and currents in the atmosphere cause it to have slightly different indexes of refraction in the same column of air. As the light from the star travels to earth, it passes through these areas and is caused to bend slightly, or refract. When viewed from Earth, the star varies in brightness and seems to jump from side to side, or twinkle!

Click to reach out on Twitter or This email address is being protected from spambots. Distance from the bowl is about 12 inches. Observe the foil through the undisturbed water.

Now using your pencil, tap the surface of the water gently. Observe the foil through the moving water. What happened? The light rays reflecting from the foil when there was a movement in water appears to blur or twinkle. The movement of the water causes the depth of the water to vary. The light rays twinkle because they bend or refract in different direction when it passed through the different depths of water.

This is similar to the light rays of the stars. They appear to be twinkling when you are observing from earth because they refract differently as the light rays move through the different thickness of air in the atmosphere. And you might as well PIN this post for future reference.

These waves disturb the air above, also causing turbulence. As light from a star races through our atmosphere, it bounces and bumps through the different layers, bending the light before you see it. Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders have been observing the twinkling of stars for thousands of years.

While twinkling looks pretty, astronomers find it very annoying. This is because it blurs the things we want to see, like distant galaxies. Well, space is the best place to see a star without a twinkle. However, getting big telescopes into space is very hard. We can build big telescopes on the ground that use lasers and bendable mirrors - bending the mirrors to match the twinkling starlight.

This then shows us the whole universe, as if the atmosphere vanished above us! Well, if you look at a star through even the biggest telescope, you still just see a tiny point of light.

This light comes through the atmosphere in a tiny beam - that can be easily knocked around. That means that the light from those planets comes through the atmosphere in a much thicker beam than that from a star - and that thicker beam is much harder to knock around.