Philip Baldwin age 12, of Charleston, West Virginia :

Do the stars really fall?

This is a very popular question. If you asked Andy please don’t feel badly because your question was not selected. You have plenty of more chances to try again ‑ as many chances as their are stars in the sky.

The idea of falling stars can be very scary. We learn that our sun is a star ‑ just a medium sized ordinary star. This average star, we hear, is much, much bigger than the whole world. In fact, there is room for over a million of our world to rattle around this fair sized star. Of course, the sun is not hollow and it is far too hot to try this experiment ‑ but it is big enough. .

After all this we hear about falling stars. In fact, we are told. to be cheerful about such frightening catastrophes and make a wish. You can see it happen almost any night of the year. A starry spark loops over and falls in an arch right over the sky. It seems to have landed over there. We breathe a sigh of relief because it did not fall on our heads. If that bright spark were really a falling star, the whole world would be ashes long, long before it came anywhere near us.

Of course, that bright spark cannot possibly be a falling star, though it looks like one. Chances are, it was no bigger than a grain of sand. It was a meteor, a solid bit of stuff drifting around the Solar System. It is part of the dust floating in the ample space between planets, moons and comets of our solar family.

You can safely make a wish on that falling star. It is not going to hurt anybody or even make a dent in the ground. Most likely it will be ashes long before it strikes. Its wandering days are over, for its traveling took it too close to the earth and it was pulled down by the force of gravity. The collision set it afire and burned it to ashes. Thousands of such meteor collisions happen every day.

Once in a great while a big meteor collides with the earth. It is not all burned up in the collision. It may strike the' ground with a thud or, more the sea with a splash. We call these emmigrants from empty space meteorites. They are very rare and we have no records of anyone having been hit by a falling meteorite.

As for the big stars like our sun, they stay in their proper places. They are not still, but there are very strict traffic rules behind their orderly paths through the vast heavens. They move around like a huge cartwheel in a system of stars called the Galaxy. There is no chance of the stars disobeying traffic regulations for they are worked by powerful forces of nature

Once in billions of years, the paths of two stars may take them fairly close together. This may cause upheavals, For two such massive bodies would exert a terrific pull upon each other at close quarters.  The empty reaches of space between the stars is too vast to imagine. A near collision is not likely. And a traffic accident is impossible, For the stars cannot fall from the sky or even change their ordered paths around the Galaxy.