Brenda, Reed, age 10, of Victoria, B.C., Canada, for her question:

What are the gases of the sun?

All the solid, liquid and gaseous substances of the earth are built from about 92 different elements. These are the earth's basic chemical elements. The sun also is built from a number of basic chemical elements, though all of them are in the form of gases. Experts identify the sun's gases with an instrument called the spectrograph, and some time ago they discovered in the sun an element unknown upon the earth. They named it helium from an ancient name for the sun, and later small quantities of the sunny element were discovered on the earth.

More than 60 of the earth's basic elements have been discovered to be present in the gases of the sun. Most of the flaming solar gas is hydrogen and helium, but traces of oxygen and carbon and most of earth's other elements also have been detected. The sun also may contain short lived, radioactive elements that do not occur normally upon the earth.