Peter Litwin, Age 9, Of Ansonia, Conn., for his question:

is Uranus bigger than Neptune?

If you know just where to look, you can sometimes see the planet Uranus as a dim dot of light in the night sky. But no human eyes could see the planet Neptune without the help of a good telescope. Yet the two planets are almost the same size. This is because Neptune is about one billion miles farther away from us than Uranus.

The size of a planet may be given as its volume, which is the amount of space it occupies. The volume of Neptune is 60 times greater than the volume of the earth; the volume of Uranus is 64 times greater than the volume of the Earth. Uranus, then, is a little bigger than Neptune, but not very much bigger.