Why planets twinkle

Because all the light is coming from a single point, its path is highly susceptible to atmospheric interference i. The much closer planets appear instead as tiny disks in the sky a distinction more easily discerned with a telescope than with the naked eye. Their apparent sizes are usually larger than the pockets of air that would distort their light, so the diffractions cancel out and the effects of astronomical scintillation are negligible.

Star wheels will help you find your way among the twinkling constellations, and you can trace the appearance of the planets along the ecliptic with a Skygazer's Almanac. 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? 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. Hello, curious kids! Ask an adult to send your question to us.

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Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. These lasers help remove the twinkles in the night sky and help astronomers see stars clearer on Earth than ever before. 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. Since planets represent several points in object space, it is highly likely that one or more points in the planet's object space get mapped to a points in image space, and the planet's image never winks out.