Betty Bomar, aged 11, of Fairfield, Conn., for her question:

How does the sun get its energy?

These days, we often hear that the sun is a hydrogen furnace. Its heat and light are like the fury of a hydrogen bomb. Yet our biggest bomb goes off in a split second. The sun has been blazing away for billions of years. It will go on blazing for billions of years to come.

In the sun, countless of little bombs are going off every second. Each little bomb has been five million years in the making. Atoms in the heart of the sun are under terrific heat and pressure. Their outer shells of electrons are stripped from them. The little bombs are made from these stripped atoms. We call this subatomic energy.

In five million years, four atoms of hydrogen become one atom of helium. The process is thought to take six comp.‑ex steps. A carbon atom is used to start things going, Isotope atoms of nitrogen and oxygen are formed along the way. It is a sort of gin rummy game among the particles that make up these atoms. Certain particles are taken and others discarded along the way. The radiant energy of the sun comes from the discarded particles. When the merger is complete, the carbon atom is clear and ready to start off another cycle,

The final helium atom has fewer particles than the original hydrogen atoms. These extra particles have been given off as the heat and light of the sun. The fuel used in the furnace is hydrogen gas, of which the sun has a boundless supply. Helium gas is the ash left behind after the bomb cycle is complete.

One of these little atom bombs would not amount to much. But in the sun their number going off every second is beyond imagination, It is possible to estimate the total energy given off by the sun in tons per second. Let's try and imagine what one ounce of heat and light energy would be,

Suppose a 40 watt light bulb could burn without stopping for two million years, It would give off one ounce of energy.  The sun gives off four million tons of energy every second. One pound of that energy is enough to turn 30 million tons of solid rock into seething lava,

These figures make us glad that we are some 93 million miles from the atomic furnace. We are also glad that it teems out from the blazing star in all directions. Only two‑billionths of it falls upon us as sunlight. But that is enough to keep our whole world comfortable. Suppose we could harness and use this sunlight to the full as it fell upon the earth. Let’s imagine what we could do with the energy that falls upon 20 square miles of the earth's surface. Put to its full user it would provide enough power for all the needs of the whole United States.