Susan Spok, age i2, of Franklin Park, N.J., for her question:

Haw many stars are in the Milky Way?

The hazy glow of the Milky Way comes from countless distant stars. We cannot count the teeming crowds one by one, even with the help of the best telescope. What's more, patches of the Milky Way are hidden from us by dark clouds of gas and smokey debris. We cannot count thin star by star, but we can estimate their total number.

Experts estimate that there are roughly 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. This figure may be wrong by a billion or so, but there is no shortage of stars in our pinwheeling galaxy.  And all of them are separated from each other by millions and sometimes by untold trillions of miles.