John David Hulbert, age 10, of Huntsville, Alabama, for his question:

Does the sun move too?

So far as we know, everything in the heavens is on the go. The spinning and whirling is enough to make a person's head spin. Our sun is just an ordinary star and it happens to be just as dizzy as all the other stars in the sky. It does everything that our little earth does, though naturally on a much grander scale. It spins around on its axis and it travels around a super superior orbit through the Milky Way.

We can enjoy its warm golden sunbeams, but no sensible person ever looks directly at the sun. This  is because its dazzling brilliance is so strong that it can cause permanent damage to the eyesight. So we must depend on the experts to tell us how it really moves. They do not look directly at it either, but get their information from shadowy images of the sun's face. These pictures show the sun's blotchy complexion, with rashes of sunspots moving from side to side.

This can only mean that the sun's face turns around, somewhat as the earth rotates around on its axis. However, the earth is a solid ball that rotates around altogether as one unit. The sun is made entirely of blazing gases. As it spins around, they do not behave as a solid unit. They spin faster at the sun's equator and lag farther and farther behind toward its poles. The sun's axis, of course, runs through the center from pole to pole. The equator is halfway between the two poles and the starry sun rotates toward the east, just as the earth does.

Sunspots prove only part of the story because they appear only in wide belts above and below the equator. Suppose there is a blotchy rash just north of the equator, in the center of the sun's dazzling face. Each day it moves farther to the side and in about a week it disappears around the edge. But two weeks later, those same blotchy sunspots appear on the opposite side. Then they take about two weeks to march once more across the sun's face. Or so it .seems. Actually, they did not circle the sun, but the sun carried them around as it rotated.

From this and other evidence, we know that the sun's equator spins around in about 25 days. The sunspot belts lag behind an extra too or three days. Farther north and south, each rotation takes 33 days and the lagging polar regions take 34 days. The sun, of course, pours forth its radiance all the time from every square inch of its surface. If it had day and night as we do, they would last about 3 1/2 weeks at the equator and more than a month at the poles.

H!ed that the sun moves along a path through the stars. This was very hard to detect because its position had to be checked against other stars. But now we know that the sun also moves through the Milky Way and each orbit around the Big Wheel takes about 200 million earth years. Maybe the dizzy sun also dances other steps, but at least we know that it spins like a top while it whirls on a monsterous merry round.