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katch wreck

it's pretty cool that every twinkle of every star is actually some large cosmic-scale object momentarily obstructing the single ray of light, from each star, that was perfectly aligned with your eyeballs at that exact moment in time, for one split-second, millions or billions of years ago

@katchwreck I think the twinkling is more from passing through the earth's atmosphere. Most exoplanets are detected by observing the shadow caused by them moving in front of their star though!

@kuraisle hard to say, but my understanding is that it's because of objects much bigger than exoplanets! the atmosphere alone is not going to completely block the light, and there's a loooooong path for stuff to get in the way between the star and our atmosphere

@kuraisle i guess the quantitative answer would be what percent of twinkles are erased by going outside the atmosphere... this has probably been quantified