Mike Fellers, age 8, Of Indianapolis, Ind., for his question:

Do the stars move?

Most of the stars rise in the east, move over the sky and set in the western sky. If you watch them for just an hour, they certainly seem to move over the heavens. But this is only because the earth is turning around, and we are always getting a different view of the sky. For thousands of years, the stars have kept the same patterns in the sky, so perhaps they do not really move at all.

However, the experts tell us that they do move. All our stars are whirling around in a great pinwheel. They belong to a vast system of stars caused the galaxy. But the distant stars are so far apart that we do not notice any difference in their positions for five or, perhaps, ten thousand years.