Atmospheric turbullence makes star twinkle as well - as a planet presents larger you notice it less.
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Dale say: Stars twinkle because of the Atmosphere, it's made up of gases and molecules that diffract incoming starlight
causing them to twinkle.
Stars that don't twinkle are called planets and planets don't twinkle because they don't emit light.
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Julie say: because of that nursery rhyme. It's social conditioning. The planets don't think they can twinkle. The stars think they're supposed to. It's so unfair.
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Leonardo say: The scientific name for the twinkling of stars is stellar scintillation. They do this because we view them through thick layers of moving air within the earths atmosphere, causing the light to dilate and stretch, producing the twinkling phenomenon. If you were to view any star from space, it would not twinkle at all, rather just be a bright dot. Planets don't twinkle because they do not produce as much light as stars do, as stars are massive spheres of gas, while planets are not.
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Jcorvette 72 say: because planets are not stars and stars are not planets...thats how i tell a planet from a star.
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Raghavendran say: They do, but to very little extent.
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Gian say: Stars are so far away from Earth as the light traveling a zig-zag path to our eyes, instead of the straight path the light would travel if Earth didn’t have an atmosphere.
Planets are closer to Earth, the light from these planet is also refracted by Earth’s atmosphere, when it is travels toward our eyes. But when light came from one edge of a planet’s disk might be forced to one way and light from the opposite edge of the disk might be came in an opposite way. Both lights cancel zigzag motion and that’s why planets appear to shine steadily.
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ArmonuS say: tStars produce light, planets don
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Hindusufi say: With a telescope you can see that any of the planets form a disk, rather then a point. A disk is not affected by changes in the atmosphere, a point source of light is.
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Zardoz say: Hold up a dime a foot in front of your face and blink your eyes left and right. Notice that the dime seems to move to a completely different spot.
Now hold up a beachball in front of your face and blink your eyes left and right. The beachball doesn't move to a completely different spot* does it?
*If the beachball were featureless it would almost seem not to shift.
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Teresa say: Actually stars don't twinkle, the atmospheres between them and us make it seem as if they are twinkling. Also, note that stars are suns, just far, far away in different solar systems, while planets are like Earth, which means they arent as bright since they aren't balls of floating gas and fire.
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