Dilliam Metzger, age 9, of Cleavland, Ohio, for his question:

Which is the brightest star in the sky?

The brightest star we ever see is Sirius, the Dog Star. North of the equator it adorns the winter sky like a sparkling diamond. During our summer months it brightens the night sky south of the equator.

Sirius follows the brilliant constellation Onion over the sky. The ancients who charted the stars made it a part of the constellation Canis Major, which means the Big Do. The Dog Star snaps at the heels of Onion, the heavenly hunter.

As a star, Sirius is 27 times brighter than our sun. It is almost twice as large and almost twice as hot as our sun, but it is only half as dense. In the heavens, there are bigger and brighter stars by far than Sirius. But the Dog Star is a close neighbor, loss than 50 million, million miles from the sun. This is just a short hop in heavenly distance. Sirius is the brightest star ever seen either north or south of the equator. But sometimes it is utsh , no by a little planet ‑ which Sirius could gobble up two million times. Yet at certain times our twin planet Venus is close enough to shine brighter than the brightest star in the heavens.