Why do planets not shine?

Answer 1

Satellites Have Lights On Them But They Are Positioned A Few Mile Above The troposphere Which All Together that's Over 10 Miles In Distance. and This Little Light That May Be As Big As A Light Bulb. I Doubt The Light Is Strong Enough. But With A Sun You Have Something More Than 100 Times Bigger Than Our Earth Acting Like One Big Light Bulb From Millions Upon Millions of Light Years Away. It Take A Million Plus Years Just For The Light pf Those Suns Just To Reach Earth Just So We Can See It. So We Don't See That Sun As It Is Now But Rather Than It Is A Million Years Ago. So The Light That It Admits Is Very Weak and Flickers As All Suns Fluctuates In Heat and Shows as A Twinkle.

In Simple Saying The Satellite Is To Weak The Stars Is Much Stronger.

Stars also twinkle because in the atmosphere there are like air pockets which distort the light to pretty much create an illusion that makes them twinkle.

Or : Stars are located outside our atmosphere while most satellite are within our earth's atmosphere. As the temperatures of the air across the atmosphere varied, its reflective index varies and thus light from the stars are refracted through different angles, causing them to appear as if they are twinkling. Whereas the satellites are within our atmosphere as are not affected as such. This is similar to : if you put a coil at the bottom of a swimming pool, if the water of the pool rippled, the coil will appear to "move", but if you dive underneath the water, you do not see the coil "moving".

Answer 2

Planets do not have their own light source like stars do. Instead, planets reflect light from their host star, which is why they appear to shine in the night sky. Because they merely reflect light, planets do not produce their own light and appear dimmer than stars.

Answer 3

Because they're close enough to not be point sources.

Stars are so far away that they have no discernable disc, even through a telescope (with a couple of exceptions for truly huge stars that are relatively nearby, and very very powerful telescopes). That means that optically, all their light is coming from a single "point". If there is any distortion in the atmosphere at all... and there is always some distortion in the atmosphere... the starlight gets "bent" out of its straight line path a little, which makes the star seem to waver and twinkle.

Planets, however, are close enough that their light comes from a (very small, but not exactly zero) area. If the light gets bent a little, then you still get light from most of the rest of that area, so planets do not appear to twinkle.

Answer 4

The density of the atmosphere is not uniform as it goes on decreasing with the distance from the earth. The ray coming from the distant stars gets refracted due to the variation of densities. As the atmosphere in the earth is not stationary, hence the change in the position of the star creates the twinkling of the star.

bUT IN SPACE, YOU dont have atmosphere to refract the light, hence no twinkling stars in space...

- abid

And they don't twinkle at all

Answer 5

Planets - that is, nearby planets, in our Solar System - have a larger apparent (angular) size. You can actually see a disc, even in a small telescope. As a result, any atmospheric turbulence (twinkling) tends to cancel out, or average out. Thus, the light we get from one direction might have "twinkling", but the light from another direction (i.e., a few arc-seconds off) might not twinkle at the same time, since it came through another part of the atmosphere. As a result, we probably won't even notice this twinkling.

Answer 6

they have no light source of their own unlike the numerous stars throughout the universe. however it is sometimes possible for a planetoids surface to reflect light from a nearby star, giving it the illusion that it 'shines' much like the earth's moon.

Answer 7

Twinkling is due to atmospheric disturbances that scatter light around. For a star, which appears as a small point of light in the sky, the light gets scattered around over an area bigger than the star appears in the sky, and so the star appears to rapidly twinkle. For a planet, which appears as a small disc, the light gets scattered around over an area about the same size as the planet does, so the planet doesn't appear to twinkle as much.

Planets can twinkle if there's a lot of atmospheric disturbance. Planets also appear to twinkle when low down in the horizon, as the light has to pass through more atmosphere (and hence faces more disturbance) than when the planet is overhead. The twinkling effect is worst with Saturn as that is the naked-eye planet that cuts the smallest figure in the sky.

Answer 8

Twinkling is caused by light refraction in the atmosphere.The air is not homogeneous (the same everwhere) and different temperature and humidity regions transmit light differently, At the boundary between these regions, the path of the star's light will be bent in slightly different directions, as the regions move (the "cells" are quite small sometimes less than a few inches across) the stars apper to twinkle.

Astronomers refer to the steadiness of the atmosphere and ability to see stars shine steadily as "seeing".

Answer 9

It is a good rough guide that stars twinkle and planets don't, but, both stars and planets can be shown to twinkle somewhat to an observer of the night sky on earth. considering that the cause is moving masses of air in the atmosphere which refract slightly differently and give the bouncing or twinkling effect, and that such would not really be able to discriminate as to the source of the light - however, it is much more pronounced in stars, because they are so much further away and act more like points of light, whereas the relatively nearby planets in the solar system have a much larger apparent disk, causing the effect to be less pronounced and less noticeable.

Answer 10

The stars twinkle because their apparent size is so small thay they appear as points in space. Planets are a lot closer and appear as small discs that can be seen with a telescope. It means that not all of the disc can be displaced simultaneously by an element of turbulence in the atmosphere, and therefore planets do not twinkle.