Eli5 if stars are shaped like big giants spheres how did we get the commonly known 5 pointed star?
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It’s likely the atmospheric scattering that’s causing the light from the stars to shift around a bit, causing the twinkle that we see.
The five-pointed star is an old symbol that long predates any knowledge of what the stars actually were or how they were shaped. Rays coming out from a center has been a way to represent brightness of an object since ancient times (the Egyptians used it for their hieroglyph for ‘star’, for example). This might be (I’m speculating here) because that’s how they look if your vision is a little bit off (you’ll see something akin to a lens flare going off from a bright point). In any case, the symbol is so old that tracing its origins is probably impossible.
If you have any astigmatism in your vision, it will cause single points of light to spread out into streaks and star-like shapes. This is because your cornea and lens can be slightly distorted from their perfect shape, either squashed or stretched, or even a little bumpy. These irregular surfaces don’t focus light perfectly. So you end up seeing stars, which are really tiny dots, as “burst”-like shapes that shimmer and shift around.
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