Frank Marciano, age 12 of Rochester, New York, for his question:

 Does the sun rotate on its axis?

Our glorious sun is a ball of blazing gases. It is hard to imagine filmy gases behaving in an orderly manner. But they do. The sun is large enough to swallow over a million earth sized planets. Yet its seething, blazing gases obey certain orderly rules. So far as we know all the heavenly bodies rotate on an axis. And this is true of the sun.

The sun rotates around once every 25 earth days. Of courses it has no day and night. For, being a ball of fire, it knows no darkness. But it does turn first one side, then another side of its glorious face towards the earth. The side of the sun which smiled at us today will two weeks from now, be facing in the opposite direction.

Astronomers watch sunspots on the radiant face of the sun. As the sun rotates, a rash or the dark spots seem to pass from one side of the round face to the other. Large sunspots last long enough to appear again two weeks later, to be carried around again by the rotating sun.