While camping, I noticed that if you look long enough at almost any star, you start seeing some tiny, subtle colors in that star. Even crazier, they sometimes flicker between more colors. In my case orange, blue and something like cyan.
Besides constellations, what else could you observe regarding starts, with the naked eye?
I think the flickering and maybe even (some of) the colors are caused by earth’s atmosphere messing with the light.
Betelgeuse will be going supernova in the next few decades and I’ve been looking at the light fluctuations.
In reality, it’s probably already happened! And the light just hasn’t reached us yet
Pretty insane to think about that550 Lj, but its only expected in 1,5mio Years
[15] R Neuhäuser, G Torres, M Mugrauer, D L Neuhäuser, J Chapman, D Luge, M Cosci: Colour evolution of Betelgeuse and Antares over two millennia, derived from historical records, as a new constraint on mass and age. In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Band 516, Nr. 1, 5. September 2022, ISSN 0035-8711, S. 693–719, doi:10.1093/mnras/stac1969
1.5 million?
100,000 years is the much more commonly reported number.Still though, should interpret my “probably” as more of a “maybe”, haha
Will we get any of the radiation? Does anyone know this?
Probably not, but at most it would be detectable levels. Radiation drops at the square of distance, and there is a lot of distance.
Stars have color in outer space. Stars flicker because of the atmosphere.
The stars actually aren’t changing color (besides variables potentially but they don’t change in seconds), they’re changing cause the atmosphere is distorting as the light reaches your eye - one of the reasons we put observatories on like mountain tops and space is that there isn’t as much atmosphere distorting the light (there’s some newer observatories that can counter-distort their mirror to cancel out atmospheric scintillation).
You can see the milky way if you go somewhere with low light pollution! It’s quite breathtaking. Also every star you see with your eyes is in the milky way. You can also see planets with your eyes, but I think that’s just Venus (which is reflective enough to see) they look like stars but move day to day. You can see some supernovae when they happen, sometimes they’re bright enough you can see then in daytime even. The movement of the stars over the year is highly predictable, even over centuries and milleniallia, some of the real old old structures like Stonehenge are aligned with the movement of the night sky. Because our planet rotates, the stars move, except (if you’re in the northern hemisphere) for Polaris which only kinda wobbles over a year - it wasn’t always Polaris, it had historically been other stars (were talking long long ago history not a lifetime lol), Polaris is in Ursa Minor in the night sky if you wanna find it 😀
If you keep a journal of the night sky you’ll probably notice a lot of the same stuff our ancient ancestors did! We have the disadvantage of light pollution but the advantage of thousands of years of scientific advancement and written and oral knowledge.
You can also see planets with your eyes, but I think that’s just Venus (which is reflective enough to see) they look like stars but move day to day.
Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars can be seen clearly from the Northern hemisphere if you’ve got fairly clear skies too :)
It would be much more surprising if they didn’t have any colour. How would that even work?
I expected them to be white and white is a non color, as far as I know.
Talking about stars and light, white is the opposite of a non-color. It’s all the colors all at once. Black is the only nob-color. Our sun isn’t actually white, it emits a broad spectrum of light which appears white to our eyes, it actually emits more green to blue-green light than anything else. Look-up the sun’s spectrum or the main sequence of stars and you’ll see what I mean.
Stars can appear red or blue depending on the direction they are traveling. It has to do with the frequency of light they put out. As they move away the frequency gets lower, which we interpret as red. As they get closer the frequency gets faster which we interpret as blue.
I am not an astronomer or even a casual stargazer. I took a single class in Astronomy in college and this was a neat fact I picked up. I remember next to nothing else from the class other than the fact that you can fit every planet between the earth and moon.
This is all correct and is commonly known as redshift or blueshift. It’s the same idea as when a car or train passes by and you hear the pitch get higher as it approaches you, and then lower as it leaves you.
To add to it though, stars themselves (regardless of our perspectives on them) do come in different colors. Betelgeuse is an easy star to find in the night sky that has a distinctly redder color compared to most stars. It’s the left armpit star in the constellation Orion.
Stars have different colors based on many factors like their composition and how hot they burn.
I don’t think redshift applies to stars, as all the stars we can see are in the milky way and not moving away from us, not sure of there’s any galaxies you can see with the naked eye
It does apply, technically, but yeah the effect is too small to see with the naked eye
A few nearby galaxies are visible, most notably Andromeda, but still redshift isn’t naked eye visible for these
