Why Stars Twinkle

Cromwell Argus, Volume LXVIII, Issue 3485, 6 September 1937, Page 7

Why Stars Twinkle

The difference to the eyo between a star and a planet is that the stars twinkle, having light of their own, while planets, being visible only in the reflected light of tho sun. shine with a steady glow. But why do stars twinkle? Our sun —an ordinary star —doesn’t twinkle to us. One theory is that stars twinkle because being incandescent, they are subject to great electrical storms and their light is in a constant state of varying intensity. Another theory is that, since a beam of light is made up of a number of light waves of varying colors, each color having a different wave length (red the lower, violet tho higher as in the spectrum), over the colossal distances travelled by the light from the star to this earth, ‘-differential refractive action” causes the star to appear to twinkle. An ingenious explanation just put forward is that space being full of inter-stellar bodies —dead, solid, nonluminous, like our meteorites whirling around in undefined paths, their passing and repassing across the face of the distant stars cuts off their light intermittently. When one realises that some stars are as large ae the whole of our solar system (that is to say, occupy as much space as a circle having the sun for its centre and our far planet Pluto for a point on its circumference), it seems hardly possible that the passage of even huge meteorites, as large or larger than our moon, -would have the slightest effect on the appearance of the stars as seen from this earth.