info regarding wierd characteristics of star

[jmode]

Lately Ive seen what I believe to be stars wich pulsate very faint blue lines of electro magnetic energy from all around them,giving them a spinning wheel like look.I dont know anything about the behaviour of stars and was wondering if any one could tell me a bit about what these are.thanks

 

[doubletruncation]

Hi jmode!<br /><br />Could you be a little more specific about when you saw such stars, where they appeared on the sky? Were you looking through a dirty window, or do you have long hair? Stars that are very low on the horizon can sometimes appear very funky (they can appear to be jumping around and also to rapidly change color), these stars are just twinkling which is caused by the Earth's atmosphere, when they're low on the horizon the light has to travel through more atmosphere so the stars appear to twinkle more.<br /><br />I've noticed that if I have hair in front of my eyes, or if I look with my eyes nearly closed (so that I'm looking through eyelashes), or if I look through a dirty window then light sources (including streetlights and stars) can appear to have lots of faint lines emanating radially from them. These are diffraction spikes. The fact that light does this is proof of its wave nature. The shape of the diffraction pattern is determined by the shape of the aperture that you're looking at the light through. If you have thin strands of hair blocking your eye then you can see radial spikes, the number of these spikes and their thickness depends on how many hairs are in front of your eye and how thick they are. Diffraction is I think a very interesting topic - there are probably lots of good tutorials about it on the internet, but I don't know of any unfortunately. <br /><br />You can also see diffraction spikes in images - these are the rays or lines which sometimes appear to be emanting from stars, you can see them really well for example in this image http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060109.html<br /><br />Spikes like these are caused by the telescope. In certain telescope designs you can have two or more mirrors, the light comes in bounces of the first mirror towards a second mirror which reflects it back towards the first mirror or out the side of the telescope. You can see <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>

 

[vogon13]

Cataracts?<br /><br />CVA?<br /><br /> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#ff0000"><strong>TPTB went to Dallas and all I got was Plucked !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#339966"><strong>So many people, so few recipes !!</strong></font></p><p><font color="#0000ff"><strong>Let's clean up this stinkhole !!</strong></font> </p> </div>

 

[Boris_Badenov]

We really need more information, are you looking through a telescope?<br /><br /> (Don't worry about Vogon, unless he tries to vivisect you!!) <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <font color="#993300"><span class="body"><font size="2" color="#3366ff"><div align="center">. </div><div align="center">Never roll in the mud with a pig. You'll both get dirty & the pig likes it.</div></font></span></font> </div>

 

[enigma10]

stars are not stationary. They do spin. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <em>"<font color="#333399">An organism at war with itself is a doomed organism." - Carl Sagan</font></em> </div>

 

[CalliArcale]

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr /><p>Lately Ive seen what I believe to be stars wich pulsate very faint blue lines of electro magnetic energy from all around them,giving them a spinning wheel like look.I dont know anything about the behaviour of stars and was wondering if any one could tell me a bit about what these are.thanks<p><hr /></p></p></blockquote><br /><br />First off, as others have said, it would be useful to know how you are observing these stars. You can see different things about stars if you view them with the naked eye, through a telescope, through a long duration exposure, through filters, or through images published by scientific observatories in non-visible wavelengths.<br /><br />Stars do give off electromagnetic energy, in particular, visible light. And stars tend to be highly dynamic. However, spinning wheel-like formations are not generallyperceptable to the naked eye, or even to very many telescopes -- with the exception of our own Sun, most stars are too far away to make out that kind of detail. So I think you're either seeing something other than a star (such as a nebula, although these do not pulsate; they seem static to the naked eye) or you are seeing stars twinkling in the night sky through a layer of haze. The brightest stars, such as Sirius and Vega, would be good candidates. Sirius is especially notorious for flickering as air currents distort the image. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p><font color="#666699"><em>"People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly . . . timey wimey . . . stuff."</em>  -- The Tenth Doctor, "Blink"</font></p> </div>