Nancy Hall, age 12, of Toronto, Dntario, Canada, for her questing:

Why do stars twinkle?

A star is a monstrous nuclear furnace, shooting off immense flames and flashes of blazing radiation is all directions. These fiery outbursts spurt up in sudden flares and some of them are big enough to engulf our world and a hundred like it. When you watch the twinkling of a sparkling star, you may suspect that you are actually seeing its monstrous, fiery flames. But this is not so. The star is too far away for us to see such details and even a powerful telescope reveals it only as a pinpoint of light.

Out in space, all the stars look like bright pinpoints of light. But from the earth, we see them through the thick shell of the earth's atmosphere. Its gaseous molecules play tricks with beams of starlight. The atmosphere bends and twists these starry beams this wag and that. It seems to switch them on and off and brilliant daggers dart out from the star in all directions. These sparkling twinkles are created by the air molecules in our own atmosphere.