Ah, it’s a lovely night to enjoy the outdoors. Sales in the warm summer air to listen to the crickets and breathe in the aromas of green life and then turn the head towards the heavens. You see hundreds of stars in the sky, and the brightest are striking and bright.
Some are even changing their colors through the rainbow, delighting your eyes and mind, unless you are out there to observe with a telescope. That scintillating is lovely for any average Stargazer for sight, but scientifically it is a pain in the astronomer.
Hitting is the apparent rapid variation of brightness and the color of the stars. It is technically called the scintillation, from Latin to “sparkle”, which is suitable. While it is certainly charming, it is still the ruin of astronomers around the world.
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For millennia, the sparkles misunderstood. As with so many scientific principles, it was Mishag. Ancient Greeks as Aristotle, who attributed it to human vision. At that time, he and his companions believed that the eye actively created the vision by sending beams that illuminated objects and allowed us to see them. But these beams were imperfect, so the belief was, and the farther an object was, the more the beam would be distorted; The stars, being far away, suffered this defect greatly, which made them shine. It was Isaac Newton, through his optical studies, who finally determined the true cause.
A fundamental property of the light, true of all waves, in fact, is that it bends when it goes from one medium to another. You are familiar with this: a spoon sitting in a glass of water looks at the top of the liquid. This is called a refraction, and in the case of the spoon, it occurs when the light goes from water in the glass in the air on its way to its eye, which is in the shape of the spoon in another way a belte. The amount of refraction depends on the properties of the materials through which the light travels. The density, for example, can dictate the degree of refraction for the light that moves through gas, so the light that travels only through the air will still be folded if the air has different densities from one place to another.
If the atmosphere of the Earth were perfectly static and homogeneous, then the refraction of the light of the stars would be minimal. However, our air is always in motion, and far from being soft. The winds well above the planet surface stir the air, creating turbulence. This throws the gases, creating small air packages of different densities that move from one place to another.
The star of the star that passes through one of those packages or air will be folded slightly. From our point of view on Earth, the position of the star will change slightly when that happens. The air is also in motion, so from one moment to another, the light of the star will pass through different plots on its way to its eye or its detector, changing the position each time, randomly use due to the turbulent movement of the air. What you see on the floor, then, is that the star changes quickly to the left, to the right, up and down, and all intermediate directions, several times per second, in other words, sparkling.
The amount of change is confused “seeing” by astronomers, and is real quite small. In general, they are only a few arches, a very small angle in the sky: the full moon, for example, has approximately 1,800 arches wide. The stars, designed, are so far from us that they seem to be a tiny fraction of an arc wide, a small point of light for the eye, so even this tiny of arcose-escalas seem to dance.
Keep in mind that that is why the planets typically No Scintillation. Jupiter, for example, is usually several arcsgunds boxes wide, so the twinkling does not affect its position so much, and we perceive that its light is stable.
The twinkling is usually more obvious to the stars near the horizon than above. The atmosphere is a shell of air that surrounds the earth. When we look directly, we are looking through approximately 100 kilometers of air, but towards the horizon, that length is introduced to more than 1,000 km! That gives air many more opportunities to refract the light of the star, increasing scintillation.
But it is not just a position that sparkle affects. Different wavelengths – colors – or light is refracted by different quantities. This is why a drop of prism or a drop of rain lights in separate colors to create an rainbow. For a star, which can emit light in essence in all colors, this means that something is that the red light is towards you and the blue folds, so the star seems reddish. A fraction of a second later, a different air plot refracts the blue light towards you, and the star causes a blue.
This effect is more evident for white stars near the horizon. Sirius is white, and is the brightest star in the night sky; When lifting or adjusts, it can blink brightly and change color quickly. That is why or is informed as a UFO! Then, if he listens to a report that a bright spacecraft quickly changed color while hiting on trees, keep in mind that almost certainty was not an alien sun an alien sun.
However, for astronomers, the sparkle leads to a very different result: the light of an object extends through the exposure time of an image. Details in a distant galaxy, for example, look out of focus and blurry. In addition, weak objects appear even weaker because their light is stained. These are serious problems, but for which we have a solution: adaptive optics. Within some telescopes there are sensors that can detect the amount of spindle. This information is sent to a computer that quickly calculates the distortion, then adjusts the pistons behind a deformable mirror to remodel the reflective surface in a way to compensate for the spinder. Most large terrestrial telescopes use this incredible technology, which produces clear and clear images despite atmospheric turbulence.
Twinkling also has scientific use. The son of the light we see is not the only child who refracts; Radio waves also do it when they go through interstellar plasma, ionized gas between stars. Pulsares are neutron stars turning quickly that send radio wave pulses at fast intervals. Radio waves twinkling while passing through plasma on their way to Earth, and astronomers can measure that sparking to investigate that plasma. Research published in Astronomy of Nature In April 2025, he used this to look at the material in the space near the sun and draw structures in the local bubble, a region of space that surrounds the sun where the ancient supernovae cleared much of the gas. The scientists found 21 large plasma arches sustained by turbulence inside the bubble, which surprised them because previously the bubble was supposed to be softer.
Personally, I am or two minds on the brightness. It is lovely, certainly, but I was quite left or I was using a telescope for my own research. Depending on what he is trying to study, he thought, it can still be a useful tool. Then one could say that my own opinion about the spark is malleable; It can be anyway.
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