If Stars twinkle why dont we sea the nearest tar (the Sun)twinkle/?
537296
Mainly because the sun is so much closer than any other star. The twinkling effects our atmosphere causes on other stars is simply overcome by the brute force of sunlight.\n\nDistant stars twinkle due to Earth's atmosphere, but then why don't planets also twinkle; they look to be about the same size? Here's a good explanation I cut-and-pasted for you from an astronomy website --\n\n"Just like a computer screen, your eye is composed of a certain number of 'pixels,' each represented by a single light-receptor cell in your retina. If two (or more) points of light are close enough such that they are focused on the same receptor cell in your eye, you will experience them as a single point of light. This is the 'resolution' of your eye. \n\nNow, a star on the sky is in a true sense a single point of light. All the light comes through the atmosphere in exactly the same direction, through exactly the same atmospheric turbulence, and thus is bent in exactly the same way. So when it gets to your eye, the amount of light you see varies. It also strikes (primarily) only a single receptor ('pixel') in your eye. \n\nOn the other hand, light from a planet is different. Each of a few receptors in your eye sees a large number of light rays coming from the planet, each of which has been bent differently by the atmosphere (since the planet has size on the sky, they are arriving in slightly different directions). Some of these rays will become brighter, some dimmer. But because they all illuminate the same receptor in your eye, that receptor only sees the total amount of light hitting it. There will be about the same number of enhanced rays as dimmed rays, so you experience a steady light, not a twinkle."
8576
I saw an interesting documentary on Nova about this.  There is a scientest that has some good proof that the tremendous energy required for lightening to strike actually comes from outside of our earth.  He came to this conclusion after finding that the energy produced by the seperation of + and - in a cloud was just not nearly enough to make the lightening happen.\n\nSo get this, his theory is that the extra energy comes from cosmic rays delivered by dying stars.  He has proved this by using equipment which detected X-Rays where thunder clouds are.
318462
The sun shines for the same reason a fire radiate light.\nAnd we need the sun because without it it would be freezing cold outside. In fact the Earth and all the solar system wouldnt exist if the sun wasnt there because there wouldn't the gravitational field the sun provides to gather elements and form planets.
181847
Because planets are actually moving in relation to stars.  They are orbiting the sun.  They are also a lot closer to us than stars.  For example, when you drive, you see mountains in the distance.  You are passing those mountains at 65 miles an hour.  They appear to be going by very slowly.  But when you pass a light pole right next to you at the same speed, it appears to whizz by really fast even though it's the same speed.
342181
Well the nearest star system is light years away. So if they send one, we won't find out the findings. Besides, how would we send commands and receive them, they would have to travel light years of distance. So I would say no.
186531
There are more than a hundred-odd 'sun's in our skies, of which our Sun [one of the smallest among these 'sun's] is the closest to us !\nAs the Earth and other planets are in constant orbit around our Sun, it obviously appears to be in the sky ! \n...Incidentally, what we commonly call our 'sky' is also a mere 'mirage', or optical illusion : It only consists of various 'atmospheric' gases [and moisture-laden clouds that float in them], plus an upper ozone-layer - all of which the light rays from the Sun illuminate. \nThis illumination causes us to imagine that there is a blanket-like bluish 'sky' above us ! As the Sun also seems to be 'up there', we say in non-technical words that the 'Sun is in the sky' !
90070
Simple, it's just an atmospheric effect, they really don't twinkle. It's kind like seeing a tree in middle of an hot desert, with the hot air rising from the ground, the tree seems to move..
138088
The hubble telescope it up above all the atmospheric disturbance, allowing for much higher quality photos.\n\nFor the same reason stars twinkle, land based telescopes have a limited resolution power, after a certain size, it doesnt really help any (unless you want to build a complicated atmospheric correction machine to adjust the mirror to compensate).
231023
This is caused by thermic convection of the air. In the deserts you normally have high differences in temperature between day and night, so hot air is rising rapidly while cold air is moving downwards after sunset. This different densities in the air makes the light bend and the stars seems as if they are dancing, just as if you were looking through an irregular glass. \nIt's a bad night for astronomers.
174795
It is Olbers' Paradox.\n\nWhy isn't the night sky as uniformly bright as the surface of the Sun?  If the Universe has infinitely many stars, then it should be.  After all, if you move the Sun twice as far away from us, we will intercept one quarter as many photons, but the Sun will subtend one quarter of the angular area.  So the areal intensity remains constant.  With infinitely many stars, every angular element of the sky should have a star, and the entire heavens should be as bright as the sun.  We should have the impression that we live in the center of a hollow black body whose temperature is about 6000 degrees Celsius.  This is Olbers' paradox.  It can be traced as far back as Kepler in 1610, and was rediscussed by Halley and Cheseaux in the eighteen century; but it was not popularized as a paradox until Olbers took up the issue in the nineteenth century.
96173
Here's what they don't teach you in advanced astro-physics:\n\nThey twinkle because they're happy, like when a puppy's tail wags.
752575
The scientific name for the twinkling of stars is stellar scintillation (or astronomical scintillation). Stars twinkle when we see them from the Earth's surface because we are viewing them through thick layers of turbulent (moving) air in the Earth's atmosphere. \n\nStars (except for the Sun) appear as tiny dots in the sky; as their light travels through the many layers of the Earth's atmosphere, the light of the star is bent (refracted) many times and in random directions (light is bent when it hits a change in density - like a pocket of cold air or hot air). This random refraction results in the star winking out (it looks as though the star moves a bit, and our eye interprets this as twinkling). \n\nStars closer to the horizon appear to twinkle more than stars that are overhead - this is because the light of stars near the horizon has to travel through more air than the light of stars overhead and so is subject to more refraction. Also, planets do not usually twinkle, because they are so close to us; they appear big enough that the twinkling is not noticeable (except when the air is extremely turbulent). \n\nStars would not appear to twinkle if we viewed them from outer space (or from a planet/moon that didn't have an atmosphere). \n\n\n---------------------------------------------------------------------------------\nStars, except for the Sun, although they may be millions of miles in diameter, are very far away.  They appear as point sources even when viewed by telescopes.  The planets in our solar system, much smaller than stars, are closer and can be resolved as disks with a little bit of magnification (field binoculars, for example).\n\nSince the Earth's atmosphere is turbulent, all images viewed up through it tend to "swim."  The result of this is that sometimes a single point in object space gets mapped to two or more points in image space, and also sometimes a single point in object space does not get mapped into any point in image space.  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.\n\nSince 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.  Each individual ray is twinkling away as badly as any star, but when all of those individual rays are viewed together, the next effect is averaged out to something considerably steadier.\n\nThe result is that stars tend to twinkle, and planets do not.  Other extended objects in space, even very far ones like nebulae, do not twinkle if they are sufficiently large that they have non-zero apparent diameter when viewed from the Earth.\n-------------------------------------------------------------\n\n\nI can be more specific, sure. Remember that just like a computer screen, your eye is composed of a certain number of "pixels," each represented by a single light-receptor cell in your retina. If two (or more) points of light are close enough such that they are focused on the same receptor cell in your eye, you will experience them as a single point of light. This is referred to as the "resolution" of your eye, or any telescope for that matter. \n\n\nNow, a star on the sky is in a true sense a single point of light. All the light comes through the atmosphere in exactly the same direction, through exactly the same atmospheric turbulence, and thus is bent in exactly the same way. So when it gets to your eye, the amount of light you see coherently varies. It also strikes (primarily) only a single receptor in your eye. \n\n\nOn the other hand, light from a planet is different. Each of a few receptors in your eye sees a large number of light rays coming f
1173785
Stars don't move our sun is a big star it is our planet that orbits our star so that is why it seems like the stars move my lov.
388047
The Sun does not "burn", like we think of logs in a fire or paper burning. The Sun glows because it is a very big ball of gas, and a process called nuclear fusion is taking place in its core. Nuclear fusion occurs when one proton smashes into another proton so hard that they stick together...and release some energy as well. This energy then heats up the other materials (other protons and electrons and such) nearby. This heating eventually grows out from the center (or core) of the star to the outside, finally leaving the surface and radiating out into space to be the heat and light we know stars emit. People, including scientists, sometimes say that the Sun "burns hydrogen" to make it glow. But that is just a figure of speech. Hydrogen really doesn't burn, it fuses, into helium. So no oxygen is required!
1103870
Planets do not twinkle the way stars do. In fact, this is a good way of figuring out if a particular object you see in the sky is a planet or a star. The reason is that stars are so far away that they are essentially points of light on the sky, while planets actually have finite size. The size of a planet on the sky in a sense "averages out" the turbulent effects of the atmosphere, presenting a relatively stable image to the eye.
17005
Stars seem to "twinkle " because of heat waves in the atmosphere .  They twinkle less in cold weather than in warm .
403616
yes we can, and actually astronomers have been working on it for the last 15 years or so, the problem is that there is no telescope currently powerful enough to directly see any planets orbiting other stars, the most common problem is that what little light is reflected by the planet gets easily lost in the glare of the stares light, so the only way that we can find out weather or not a star has planets orbiting around it, is by looking at the influence the planet has on the star, like causing it to wobble, this is because as a planet orbits around a star, it causes the star to slightly wobble with the orbit of the planet, and it is that slight wobble by which astronomers can estimate the mass and speed of rotation and many other details about the planet.\n\nnow if you are asking this to find out if there's any life out there, i would suggest reading this book called "Faint Echoes, Distant Stars" it will open up a whole new world of possibilities to you, here is a link to it\nhttp://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?z=y&isbn=0060750995&itm=4