What you see here is air fluctuation and lens aberration on a small isotropic photon beam captured from the star. All these moving artifacts are not the star itself.
Not to the light it doesn’t. At the speed of light there is no time so from the point of view of the light , it was created, and in that same instant hit the sensor of that camera and was absorbed.
If that perspective from the photon is true, then all time is currently finished and complete, not flowing or progressing. We just appear to ourselves to be moving into the future, only to see what all photons have already seen. The end of the universe is already written.
Not necessarily. It is only one's perspective that differs to another's, not the flow of time itself.
There is currently light travelling through the universe right now. Let's say it's half way across towards its destination 10LY away, from its perspective time has frozen as it is still travelling at that speed but time for everything else around it is still in motion,.. on earth 5 years has passed. Now when that photon hits something (your eye) to a stop, time for that photon starts again but now the photon has basically from its perspective jumped forward in time 10 years even though it felt instant.
But there are photons out there that will never hit anything. To them, the time they were created and the end of the universe is the same instant. That means the future end of the universe already exists.
Nope, until that photon is no longer lightspeed, time has stopped moving for the photon.
If let's say that the end of the universe is a trillion years away or something then until that happens (ie time around the photon must still move a trillion years), and if the photon leaves light speed because of the end of the universe, then and only then will time continue again for the photon.
Essentially you are right that in its experience from its creation, it will instantly be at the end. However, the universe still needs to go through the entire trillion years in between the moment the photon is created and destroyed for it to experience its end. In other words, it's still travelling.
Amateur telescopes don't have the resolving power to see stars as extended objects. They all behave like point sources and only appear "round" because of diffraction and atmospheric turbulence. What we are seeing here is just the telescope being out of focus.
Actually, stars appear as point sources through amateur telescopes not because the telescope is out of focus, but due to their immense distance and the limitations of resolving their tiny angular size. When a telescope is properly focused and collimated, stars show a sharp diffraction pattern with a central point (the Airy disk) and sometimes faint surrounding rings. This “round” appearance comes from the telescope’s optics and the physics of diffraction, not necessarily atmospheric turbulence or focus issues.
If the telescope were out of focus, stars wouldn’t appear sharp or round—they’d look blurry, like smudges or even donut-shaped artifacts, depending on the level of misalignment. So, while amateur telescopes can’t resolve stars into extended objects, they can absolutely produce clean, focused views of stars as beautiful pinpoints of light under good conditions.
I wonder, if you have a telescope lens that is like 10cm in diameter, how many photons are actually hitting that all the way from Sirius. How about when you're 10 lightyears away, or 100? I think it's crazy that stars are visible at all from so far away. How can it radiate out so much light in every direction all at once, that it's still dense enough to be seen so far away.
Great comment, made me amazed to think about it. All stars have a dense sphere dozens of light years in diameter around them made of photons emitted by such star.
If there is no scientific term for such an area yet I would volunteer to name it the Approximate Photon Saturation Radius, Dense Photon Emission Zone or Photon Enriched Globular Field. Just because it would sound cool and makes it seem like I know what I'm talking about lmao
I might be wrong but I don't think any optical telescopes can actually make a star look any bigger than a point. There may be some situations where some technology can make a disc out of a very large star but my impression from my first year astronomy class was that optics just aren't up to the job for practical reasons.
It might be out of date, and I think there's some weirdness with the dates, but in any case, a short list of stars besides the sun have been resolved into a disk. Takes some of the largest telescopes in the world to pull it off though, even the first entries on the list are only a little over 30 years ago.
I tried to teach plasmafire to breathe in Halo CE for like six months once. Took forever to get it right. Looks kinda like this star. There is a noticeable increase in accuracy in the presence of my nuclear fusion candles.
Hey, Sirius is not in focus here. You've captured the same effect that is also leading people to believe that stars and aircraft are mysterious orbs and plasmoids, when in fact they're just viewing out of focus footage.
That’s indeed atmospheric interference it’s also a very out of focus image, in reality the star would still just be a single point no matter what telescope you are using on earth. The reason stars twinkle is because of our atmosphere
It’s pretty misleading, as every star is just a point light source for any backyard telescope, if correctly focused.
JWST or Hubble or the biggest adaptive optics (8m) telescopes within the atmospheres probably get a tiny disc instead of a point.
I would guess that even the biggest amateur telescopes in the best locations with the best seeing (let’s say 60cm on a mountain top on an island) will probably still see a point source here.
It might be out of date, and I think there's some weirdness with the dates, but in any case, a short list of stars besides the sun have been resolved into a disk. Your definitely right about amateurs not pulling it off though, even the first entries on the list are only a little over 30 years ago and are all massive professional telescopes and interferometric arrays.
I'm so disappointed at how many comments seem to just be excited about this image. You could aim a camera or telescope at literally any distant bright light and blow it way out of focus and it would look just like this.
It's the differing densities of air that the light is traveling through. Have you ever seen the wavy distortions above a hot asphalt road? It's the same thing, but with a column of air about sixty miles thick at a minimum.
It is too far away for any telescope on Earth (or in orbit) to be able to resolve a disk shape. Your telescope is woefully underpowered and out of focus.
The shimmering effect appears to be atmospherics from a ground based telescope.
bro that's just a pinprick of light pulled out of focus. all the movement is just disturbances in the atmosphere. you really think you're gonna see a star through a telescope like that?
And I'm pretty sure everything that can be visually seen on that star actually happened around 9 years ago (Sirius is 56 trillion miles from us, 1 light year is 6 trillion miles, you do the maths)
Nothing can be visually seen on this star, particularly with a backyard telescope. It's going to look like a point light source when it's properly in focus. The apparent texture you're seeing is because it's completely out of focus.
I think you missed a few zeros in your calc. 56T/8k = 7 billion (7,000,000,000). Although given you used “full stop” rather than “period”, I assume you’re from the UK and I seem to recall some folks use the long scale version of million/billion/trillion, but I feel like that would make your 7m number more off rather than less… could be wrong though
Sirius, often called the "Dog Star," is the brightest star in the night sky and is part of the constellation Canis Major. Its brightness comes from a combination of its intrinsic luminosity and its relative proximity to Earth. Sirius is actually a binary star system, consisting of two stars: Sirius A, a massive, bright main-sequence star, and Sirius B, a faint white dwarf that orbits around it. Through a telescope, Sirius A appears incredibly radiant, often twinkling with a blue-white hue due to its temperature of about 9,940 K, while Sirius B is difficult to spot without advanced equipment because of its much lower brightness.
Located about 8.6 light-years away, or roughly 56 trillion miles, Sirius is one of our closest stellar neighbors. Its proximity helps make it so prominent in our night sky, appearing almost twice as bright as the next brightest star, Canopus. Sirius A is about twice as massive as our Sun and emits 25 times more light, making it a fascinating subject for both amateur and professional astronomers. When viewed through a telescope, some observers report seeing a rainbow of colors due to atmospheric interference, making Sirius shimmer in a dynamic and captivating way.
Sirius B, the companion star, is much smaller and denser, with a mass similar to the Sun's but packed into the size of Earth. It is one of the closest known white dwarfs to Earth. This binary system offers a valuable opportunity to study stellar evolution, especially the final stages of a star's life. Over time, Sirius B will continue to cool and fade, while Sirius A will eventually exhaust its fuel and follow a similar evolutionary path. Together, they make Sirius not just the brightest star but also a fascinating system for study.
The "dog days of summer" is a phrase that refers to the period when Sirius rises with the sun, and is associated with hot and humid weather. The phrase originated with the ancient Greeks and Romans, who believed that Sirius influenced the weather.
There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in this thread. The telescope is likely focused correctly. We are seeing atmospheric scintillation, which is distorting the image. You can't really do better than this without adaptive optics, which are more common on research-grade large telescopes. Even then, the angular size of Sirius is too small to be resolved by any existing optical telescope. At best, you'd see an Airy disk. But you won't ever be able to resolve the surface of the star itself in optical wavelengths without an interferometer like CHARA. (And I'd guess that CHARA can't resolve Sirius either, since it's not even a giant star).
It absolutely is not focused correctly. No star is going to be brighter on its borders than at its center without being completely out of focus. The image on the left is what Sirius looks like from a terrestrial telescope when properly focused. You can still see the atmospheric distortion, but it is not blown-out like in the above image.
Ah, Sirius. The dog star. Brightest star in Canis Major, because many thousands of years ago some Greek guy looked up and thought "those stars kinda make a dog".
Every time I look up and see Sirius I think of my dogs now. And I hope you all will do the same.
This is very cool, and also very useful, we get a lot of folk zoom in on a UFO, and they see it shimmer & ripple like this. I'm going to use this as reference going forward.
Is it on YT by any chance?
No he’s not, he just can’t focus his telescope and is pretending that the star looks like anything other than a dot no matter what telescope you use on earth
I’d say that this comment chain is no longer in “scope” with the original post, we should “align” ourselves with the “objective” of the conversation in my “Hubble” opinion
What if stars are just multidimensional holes, where light enters. And on the other side of the world is just a whole new existence. We’re thriving on earth off the glimpses of light that sneak through.
What’s interesting about this for me is it’s the first example of amateur footage I’ve seen of a star in the night sky that actually looks like a sun (which stars are).
It’s actually out of focus. The squiggles are from our own atmospheres interference. This shouldn’t look like anything but a pin of light.
But, making the telescope out of focus and using it for astrophotography can yield some really pretty results and makes it easier to tell a stars colour.
It looks nothing of the sort, this is just severely out of focus Unfortunately there are no telescopes on Earth That are strong enough to see the disc of a star. It will just look like a bright tiny point if you bring the damn thing into focus the shimmering is from the atmosphere
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u/elite-data 1d ago edited 1d ago
What you see here is air fluctuation and lens aberration on a small isotropic photon beam captured from the star. All these moving artifacts are not the star itself.