how do you tell the differnce between stars and planets?

Question

if so how?

Answer 1

You can tell the difference with the naked Eye. (Blush). Seriously:
Generaly, Stars twinkle. Planets do not.
A star, from our perspective, is a "point" source of light. When the light from this point moves through the layers of air on our planet, it is bent and disrupted. Hence, the twinkle. A planet on the other hand, can be considered a "disk" (Read larger) source of light and less susceptible to the air disturbances.

Answer 2

Contrary to what mathwiz said, the naked eye planets are brighter than most stars; Venus, Jupiter, and Mars at opposition being brighter than any star in the night sky. A planet in our solar system will move from one night to the next, relative to the stars. The major planets will all show a disk through a telescope at sufficient magnification. Because they are tiny disks and not points of light like stars, planets tend not to twinkle like stars.

Extraterrestrial planets are distinguished by their mass, though as darkmagicianboi points out, there's a grey area (or maybe a brown area) at the boundary between very large planets and brown dwarfs.

Answer 3

The stars stay in fixed patterns called constellations. The planets move from place to place in the sky, sometimes appearing in one constellation and sometimes another. So you need a good sky map or you need to know what the constellations should look like, so that you recognize if there is an extra star that doesn't belong. If you look at that star on several different nights several weeks apart, and the star changes position, then it is a planet. Of course, looking at it with a telescope will be a dead giveaway too.

Answer 4

The simplest way is with a telescope. (You may be able to see it with the naked eye, but my eyes are terrible so I wouldn't know.)

When looking at the object through a telescope, if it' a star, you will notice "wobbling." (Make sure you've mounted the telescope on a tripod so that it's not your movements that you're noticing.) The planets will appear as non-moving bright objects. If you have a decent enough telescope, you can discern the actual colors of the planets, and if you get a good telescope you may be able to see planetary features (like Saturn's rings, its moons, etc.)

It's also a good idea to get a star chart, or look at at online star chart for your location. That way, you'll know what you're looking at.

Answer 5

Stars and planets are traditionally differentiated based on two properties:

(i) Whether or not they undergo nuclear reactions that burn hydrogen in their cores. Stars do this; planets don't. In order to have high enough temperatures in the core to burn hydrogen, an object needs to have a mass of at least 75 or so times that of Jupiter. Anything more massive than that is automatically considered a star.

(ii) The way they form. Stars form when a cloud of gas, out in a nebula or other region of interstellar space, collapses under the influence of gravity. Planets, on the other hand, form when material in the disk around a pre-existing star begins to condense around rock/ice cores. You can have situations where the entire planet is almost completely rock/ice/water (such as the Earth), or situations where a large amount of gas is subsequently attracted to the rock/ice core (such as Jupiter, Saturn, etc.).

There is actually some ambiguity in the above definitions, mainly because of the existence of objects called "brown dwarfs". Brown dwarfs are too small to burn hydrogen, so they can't be considered stars, but most of them seem to form in the same way that stars do, often out on their own in a cloud of interstellar gas, so they can't really be considered planets either. The question then becomes, where is the boundary between a planet and a brown dwarf? What if you have an object that is, say, thirty times the mass of Jupiter but is located near a star? Is it a planet or a brown dwarf? Astronomers don't generally know the formation mechanism in that case, whether the object formed along with the star from condensing gas or whether it has a rock/ice core at its center like a planet.

Because of this problem, a lot of people in recent years have advocated a new, simpler distinction between planets, brown dwarfs and stars which doesn't include the formation process in it. Under this scenario, the boundary between brown dwarfs and stars is still around 75 times the mass of Jupiter, as above, but the boundary between brown dwarfs and planets is set at around 13 times the mass of Jupiter, since that is the mass at which objects reach high enough central temperatures to burn deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen which undergoes nuclear burning at lower temperatures than regular hydrogen does).

Answer 6

The difference is planets does move, and the stars glowing in the sky. If one of them is moving, is not a star.

Answer 7

a celebrity is composed of hydrogen, helium, and different gases that are continuously contemporary technique fusion. Stars burn at vast temperatures, like each thousand stages celcius/farenheit. Planets, on the different hand, could be composed of gas yet do no longer burn and are oftentimes cooler.

Answer 8

Stars are generally more bright. You would tell the differenece betwwen the sun and Mars would you?