 We're clay and Christina from his flight second grade class in Columbia, Missouri Our question is why do stars twinkle instead of shine? Hello, my name is Anna free ball and I'm a professor here at MIT I'm actually an astronomer and I'm going to answer your questions about space You ask why the stars are twinking at night and we even have little songs twinkle twinkle little star But you're right there are the stars themselves are actually not twinkling It is the earth's atmosphere that makes the stars twinkle the real stars of course are spheres of hot gas and they don't have spikes at all But when the light from the star travels through the atmosphere of the earth Which is what we call the sky what you see or the air where the clouds are and so forth That that air the mass of air actually distorts the starlight you can imagine there's a lot of wind going on in the atmosphere and It just sways the starlight a little bit left and right and back and forth and so forth And so it the round star light suddenly gets Distorted in all sorts of direction and it looks like it has spikes I'm marching from Miss Nelson second grade class in Columbia, Missouri. My question is do stars move at night or do they just look like they're moving because of the Someone else asked a related question about stars and why it looks like that they're moving on the sky The stars themselves actually not really moving sometimes they move a tiny tiny little bit But it takes years for astronomers to actually see that they're moved with respect to each other on the sky however every night the stars come up their rise and then they go down in the same way that the Sun rises in the morning and goes down in the evening and that is because Earth is actually moving so you have to imagine that all the stars in the sky actually fixed and What we are doing on earth is we're doing this here The stars and I'm doing this I'm essentially moving my head across the star and that is exact same thing as me Looking in one direction and the stars doing this So to us it looks like the stars are moving because we think we are fixed on earth But that is just the perception that we have living on this planet for real the stars are fixed in The universe and we are moving with spinning around and we're even moving with the earth around the Sun So that results in a lot of apparent motion on the sky