2007-01-14 03:30:52 · 11 answers · asked by nisha n 1 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Astronomy & Space
because they are millions of kilometres away.
2007-01-14 18:47:02 · answer #1 · answered by Alien 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Its because they are so far away. Most people have no inkling of astronomical distances. Even "close" stars are unbelievably distant. On this subject, the Hubble Space Telescope recently imaged the disk on anther star for the first time. Until then, even the largest telescopes had not seen anything but a point, just as your eyes do. There are a variety of telescopes being planned that are vastly larger than the current monsters. The goal of some is to be able to image earth like planets around nearby stars and also to do spectrograph's of those planets. That will tell us what the surface and atmosphere of the planet is made of including oxygen and chlorophyll which are dead giveaways of life. Its coming soon.
2007-01-14 04:08:06 · answer #2 · answered by Michael da Man 6 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Because they are so far away.
How do we visualize any object? The "size" of anything we see is determined by the angle formed by two lines going from our eyes to the sides (or top and bottom) of the object. A tree, for instance, appears smaller the further that we are away from it, because the angular distance between the top and bottom of the tree is smaller.
(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_size)
Now consider the angular distance between the top and bottom of the moon. It is about 30 arc-minutes. The angular size of the sun is about the same, even though it is much larger. That is because it is further away. If you keep moving away from the sun, its angular size will get smaller and smaller.
The other stars are so far away that we cannot distinguish their angular size from 0. They appear as a point.
2007-01-14 03:37:03 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
stars appear like point sources of light because they are far away and the light rays coming from them enter our eyes after large number of refractions to form a small image on the retina
2007-01-14 17:22:07 · answer #4 · answered by ikkie 2 · 2⤊ 0⤋
i believe its called the law of perspective
when u r far away from something, it "appears" smaller
stars are very far away away... maybe further than u can even imagine. so they appear as the smallest possible object: a point!
2007-01-14 03:42:17 · answer #5 · answered by sushobhan 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
stars r very far away well...the light from stars come from infinity....so the image formed is highly diminished.......so v c them as point objects .
2007-01-17 02:22:25 · answer #6 · answered by ankita haz 1 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Because stars are fare away from earth.
2007-01-14 19:15:41 · answer #7 · answered by Rajendran 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
because the stars is very far from us
2007-01-14 13:08:55 · answer #8 · answered by Scully 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
well...the light from stars come from infinity....so the image formed is highly diminished.......so v c them as point objects
2007-01-14 03:42:33 · answer #9 · answered by Meghna S 1 · 0⤊ 2⤋
because they are light years away
2007-01-14 03:44:39 · answer #10 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋