From childhood until now, we describe the shape of a star as having five pointed angles. In fact, in astronomy, stars are round like planets and other objects in the Solar System. Why is that?
Quoting Smithsoniamag, Tuesday (21/2/2023) 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, from Earth, human vision sees it not as a fiery ball of plasma, but as a soft twinkling object.
"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.
The star-shaped stars we know have five sharp corners, due to imperfections at the back of our eyeballs.
"Stars are actually round in shape, but appear spiky with several 'outstretched arms'. This is due to the inherent nature of light and the way it is refracted around objects," reads an explanation quoted from Science ABC.
The shape of the starlight that we see is because our eyes have 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, our right and left eyes also see different light rays. 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.