Eva Goldschmidt age 9, of El Cerrito, Calif., for her question:

Is it true that planets are different from stars?

Some of Andy’s young friends will grow up to be astronauts ‑ mariners who fly their great space ships across the vast oceans of the sky. They will explore the moon and perhaps land on other worlds. For a new period of man s history is just beginning ‑ the Age of the Astronauts ‑and these spacemen must know about planets and stars long before they leave the ground. We too should know about the starry sky; otherwise we shall be unable to understand and share in the exciting adventures of the astronauts.

The answer to Eva’s questions is yes, there is a great deal of difference between a star and a planet. Our beautiful earth is a planet and the nearest star to it is our glorious sun. We can look all around this wonderful world and never run out of things to see. We can look up at the tall mountains, across the wide plains and over the watery oceans. But our eyes cannot look directly at the dazzling face of the sun ‑ and this average sized star is some 93 million miles away from us.

The astronauts will be able to land on another planet, perhaps walk about and admire countless wonders as we do on earth. But they certainly could not land on a blazing star, or even come near to it.

At night we may see the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter or Saturn shining in the sky somewhat like stars. The moon also shines with a golden light. If we stood on the planet Venus the earth would also shine somewhat like a star in the sky. But the  moon and the planets are only mirrors, reflecting back the golden glory  of the sun. They are all cold globes, giving forth no light and no heat of their own.

The sun is a blazing atomic furnace; its surface is hot enough to melt iron and turn it into gas and its seething heart is even hotter. Any solid material would be boiled and turned to gas in an instant. This blazing star is the parent of the planets. It keeps them orbiting around itself and it provides them with heat and light. The sun and its family of plants, moons and comets make up the Solar System. And the blazing sun is big enough to swallow a million earth sized planets and still have room for dessert.

 Yet our sun is an average star. There are bigger and smaller stars in the heavens. So far we cannot prove that any other star has a Solar System of planets. But this is only because our telescopes are not strong enough to spot a little planet in the vast oceans of the sky.

However, it is not 1ikely that ours are the only planets in the starry sky. Experts estimate that perhaps a billion other stars have planets. This means that there are plenty of cool, solid worlds for future astronauts to explore Perhaps some of them are very much like the wonderful world which is our home in the heavens,