How does twinkle work

It looks strange, and something very similar is happening when we see stars twinkle in the night sky. A whopping kilometres tall, or more. This air, around and above us, moves and swirls around the Earth at different speeds. How fast this air travels, depends on its temperature. When the air is hot, it has loads of energy and loves to move around. Hot air is also lighter than cold air, so it rises past, and mixes with, the cold air around it. 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.

As a result, we should soon be able to produce much sharper images from here on the ground. Answer originally posted on August 5, Sign up for our email newsletter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.

See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. John A. Graham, an astronomer with the Carnegie Institution of Washington, explains. I had a random thought, maybe someone out there has a better idea. Another reason stars twinkle might be because of objects traveling in the lights path.

With this sort of occurance happening randomly every minute, every second. We could possibly looking at a very busy space, instead of the predictable space we know now. Log in to Reply. Interesting line of thought. It was proposed that stellar scintillation, could be due to the turbulence in the Oort cloud, the great envelope of debris and pristine stellar mass surrounding the solar system. This could very conveniently also explain why planets, moon, satellite do not scintillate.

Because they are within the Oort cloud! Now, it would be very easy to verify this, right? We just have to ask the astronauts! We did. Community Leaders: Notable Astronomers.