What is twinkle?

Twinkle is when stars blink on and off in the sky, just like a light that sometimes turns on and sometimes turns off.

Imagine you're looking at a tiny lamp from across a big room. If there's smoke or fog in the air between you and the lamp, the light might look blurry or flicker, it’s like the lamp is blinking through a curtain. That’s what happens with twinkle! The light from stars has to travel all the way through space to reach us, and sometimes air or other things in our atmosphere mess up the path of that light, making the star look like it's blinking.

Some stars are closer to us, so their twinkling isn’t as strong. Others are far away, kind of like how a tiny lamp across a big room would look like it was blinking a lot. So, bigger stars or closer stars might not twinkle as much, while small and distant ones do more twinkling.

You can think of the night sky as a giant light show, where some lights are steady and others blink, that’s twinkle!