Joyce Monteau, age 11, for her question:

What exactly are the stars?

Perhaps the stars are lanterns to light the sky after the sun set. Perhaps they are bright daisies in a huge blue black meadow, Or perhaps they are holes in the floor of heaven. These fanciful ideas may seem very beautiful. But the truth about the stars is even more beautiful,

The nearest star to us is about 92 million miles away and it is so bright that, even at this distance, we cannot look at it directly. It is, of course, our glorious sun. Without the smiling sun, there would be no life on earth. The distant stars are also suns ‑ some larger, some smaller than our sun. Each star is a great ball of blazing gases, sending out its light across the vast oceans of space. Their light travels at about 186,000 miles a second. Yet some of the stars are so far away that their light takes hundreds of years to reach us„