Question

(a) What is atmospheric refraction? What causes atmospheric refraction?
(b) Why do stars twinkle on a clear night?
(c) Explain why, the planets do not twinkle at night.

Answer 1

(a) The refraction of light caused by the earth's atmosphere is called atmospheric refraction. It is caused due to the varying optical densities of different layers of earth's atmosphere.
(b) The light coming from a star undergoes atmospheric refraction due to varying optical densities of air at various altitudes. The continuously changing atmosphere refracts the light from the star by different amounts from one moment to the next. Thus, the star-light reaching our eyes increases and decreases continuously and the star appears to twinkle.
(c) Planets appear to be quite big to us and can be considered to be a collection of a very large number of point sources of light. The dimming effect produced by some of the point sources is nullified by brighter effect produced by some other point sources. Thus, the overall brightness remains the same and the planets do not appear to twinkle.