Jakarta – Stars are often depicted with five pointed angles. It turns out that the shape of the star is not like that.
Reported from detikINET citing Smithsoniamag, in astronomy, the shape of a star is round like planets and other objects in the solar system. Most stars are very similar to the sun, a giant ball of burning gas billions of kilometers away.
These globular stars pump out streams of light that traverse the vast space before illuminating the night sky.
However, to human vision on earth, these stars do not look like flaming plasma balls, but soft twinkling objects.
“Why is our perception of stars so distorted? Stars twinkle for quite intuitive reasons. The movement of air in Earth’s atmosphere can dim the starlight for a moment,” said NASA.
“This is why stars on the horizon appear twinkling the most, because there is more atmosphere between us and stars near the horizon than between us and stars higher up in the sky,” explained NASA.
Reasons for the Human Eye to See Angled Stars 5
Stars look like they have five pointed angles, due to imperfections at the back of the human eyeball.
“Stars are actually round, but appear spiky with several ‘outstretched arms’. This is due to the inherent nature of light and the way it is refracted around objects,” the explanation quoted from Science ABC.
The visible form of starlight is caused by the human eye having fibers called sulture lenses that connect the eyepiece. The different conditions of the sulture lines in each eye will also produce different forms of light diffraction.
In fact, the right and left eyes also see a different light beam. This diffraction also spreads red light waves longer than blue. Because of this, starlight actually looks like a mixture of the colors of a rainbow, and even in space binoculars it appears as colorful as a rainbow.
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