Do Stars Twinkle?
Sometimes when I look in to the sky, I see many objects twinkling, some are planes and some are stars and planets. Stars are something that amuses me because some night the amount of stars in the sky just makes the night seem sort of bright.
Growing up we have all become aware of the controversial song: “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”. That made me wonder, what are stars and do they actually twinkle.
Stars consist of many basic elements that are found on the periodic table: helium and hydrogen. In fact a lot of helium and hydrogen because the more mass the star has, the more gravitational force it has. The core of each star performs nuclear fusion, which is when two or more atoms collide to create a larger atom. And during the end of the star’s life, it collapses by its own gravitational force, when the star runs
out fuel.
“Stars twinkle, I mean scintillate, because as light passes down through a volume of air, turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere refracts light differently from moment to moment” (Stars). Anything outside our atmosphere will seems to twinkle, when we look at it from our planet, but if you were to look at a star from outside our planet, let say from outer space the stars will actually not twinkle at all. The only reason we see stars “twinkling” is because of the distortion of light, when light travels through the star. When light hits the star, due to the layers of which the star consists of, the direction of the light is bent, and it seems as of the star has moved location, which to the human eye appears as twinkling.
Since the Earth’s atmosphere is turbulent, all images viewed up through it tend to “swim.”… When a star’s single point in object space fails to map to at least one point in image space, the star seems to disappear temporarily. This does not mean the star’s light is lost for that moment. It just means that it didn’t get to your eye, it went somewhere else” (Twinkle). Scientists use the word astronomical scintillation 
when they refer to the so-called twinkling we see. The farther the star is from Earth’s atmosphere, the more they twinkle. That is exactly why planets don’t twinkle. They are close to the Earth’s atmosphere and are very large in mass; very seldom can we see a planet twinkle.
So have we been living in a misconception our whole lives due to the song “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, well it depends on how we see it. We may be able to agree with this controversial song, that stars do indeed twinkle. But the extraterrestrial life living in outer space may as well disagree and claim this song is bogus.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/twinkle.html
This was a very interesting post! I have actually always wondered if stars really twinkled or if it was a figment of the imagination. I learned from this blog post that our human eye sees a “twinkle” in the star, but it is actually just the shine of light passing through. I also found it really cool that the farther away the star is from Earth, the more of a twinkle you would see and that is why planets do not “twinkle” because they are so much closer to earth’s atmosphere. I like how you introduced and concluded with the “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” song. Cool post! The link below talks more about why stars do not actually twinkle, but look like it! It goes off from what you said, nice job!
http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=3116
This was an interesting post! I like how you incorporated a simple song everyone knows with a more complex theory. Definitely not something everyone thinks about on a normal basis.