Hey buddy, they admitted they didn't know what the star even was.
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Huh for some reason I'd never considered that fact that the songwriter would have no idea what a star consisted of. Just a mysterious light in the sky.
Interesting, I think of the lyrics as describing the way a baby or toddler feels when looking at the stars. They don’t know what those bright lights are yet, they just know they’re shiny and too high up to reach.
Apparently the sun's spectral absorption lines were discovered 4 years before the song was made
I don't expect children's song writers have ever been sufficiently into science that they know about new discoveries that don't matter to them at all quickly. I doubt many people knew even the top five elements that the sun consists of
I think it's fair for them to wonder what a far away star was. They probably didn't even know that the sun was a star
Literally the next line.
They thought it was made of carbon.
"How we envy you, envy you! Lucky humans, who can close your minds to the endless deeps of space! You have this thing you call... boredom? That is the rarest talent in the universe! We heard a song — it went 'Twinkle twinkle little star....' What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matter, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
You guys are waking up in the morning without screaming? Or just not about the stars thing?
This is from a fantasy world. The not screaming is one of the ways you can tell.
I wake up to the screaming of tiny flying dinosaurs
I like to imagine the big ones used to scream all the time too.
Oh man. This is where my mind goes whenever I'm getting stoned with my chickens.
You guys are getting to sleep, and not just screaming all through the night?
The cobras are not real and cannot hurt you. Well maybe cobra commander but he just goes for the feelings.
No
GNU Terry Pratchett
Well obviously the song isn't about that star.
Did a star draw this
We are made of star stuff, so kinda!
Maybe it's about a neutron star. Those are typically on the order of 10 km radius. And it's hard to know their exact composition, which is why cosmologists dream up fun terms like "nuclear pasta" for degenerate matter.
I'm trying to make "twinkle twinkle star-whose-angular-size-from-earth-appears-small" scan but it's proving a challenge...
Twinkle twinkle little star
Not really little but very far
Some with elevation high
Like a diamond in the sky
The same planet where a dude figured out that everything is relative.
The Hapsburgs?
Then again it could be super close and the size of a potato.
Written ironically by an alien astronaut.
It’s not written about the sun
it doesn't say it's the sun in the picture
All stars are significantly bigger than earth
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/116663-smallest-known-star
By mass. But in terms of dimensions there are many stars smaller than Earth.
Incorrect. The smallest known star is 7 times larger than earth
Neutron stars?
From what i find on a quick websearch, it seems that neutron stars aren't stars. I don't really know anything about that topic
That is correct. Neutron stars, white dwarfs, and stellar mass black holes (possibly intermediate mass as well) are all stellar remnants, ie star corpses.
Yeah no shit. But in the sky, they’re merely a point. Which is what the rhyme is speaking to
The comment thread you're replying to is talking about the actual size of the celestial bodies
The narrator of the rhyme doesn’t even know what it is, much less its size. ‘How I wonder what you are’. They’re speaking to a point of light
Again, you're not wrong, but that's not the topic of the thread you're replying on
Not helpful at all. It wasnt even a star, it was the anti collision light of a 747 going from Heathrow to Dulles...