Carl Stockers age 15, of Ypsilanti, MI  

How big is a sunspot?

The radiant face of our glorious sun is often mottled. with rashes of spots. We do not notice them, for the sun is too bright for our eyes and no sensible person looks directly at it. Astronomers tell us that sunspots may be stormy upheavals on the face of the sun, most of them big enough to swallow up our whole world many times.

The diameter of the earth is about 8,000 miles. A big sunspot may have a dark center 50,000 miles wide and a somewhat lighter area around it spreading 150,000 miles from side to side. Such a monster is often accompanied by a rash of small sunspots, some of them just a few hundred miles wide,