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Saturday, December 17, 2011

Why the stars twinkle?

My friend likes to play twinkle twinkle, little start. So every time I hear it I wonder why the stars twinkle!
I didn't try to search about it or ask. But I was watching the TV show " No Ordinary Family" in the first season (E14), the super mind  boy said to his date :

Do you know why stars twinkle?
Their light travels through in our atmosphere and creates a sort of ripple effect.



So I think this explain it well for me.

But there is something else we might wonder about it. Why the sun doesn't twinkle.
We all know that the sun is a star too. And what about the moon too?
Why only stars?

This is happening because the size of the sun and the moon are bigger than the stars from earth. So they can't be affected by such slight variations like the atmosphere.
.But the stars are so tiny so it's possible to them to be affected by the atmosphere



There is another theory says that the Sun, Moon, satellites and planets are all close to us, but something happening at the edge of the Solar System causes the twinkling. Molecular gas clouds that live at the outskirts of the Solar System -- as part of the Oort cloud -- could cause the twinkling. As the starlight passes through them, the turbulence there causes the twinkling, and it's only because the other, closer objects are inside the Oort cloud that we don't see it.




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