Becky Alviani, age 10, of Sarasota, Florida, for her question:

What is radio astronomy?

Sometimes, but not always, you can slice a strange word into smaller words and sometimes the smaller words give the meaning of the big word. It so happens that this trick works for the word radio astronomy. Naturally, every young space ager knows that astronomy is the study of the starry heavens. And naturally everyone knows what a radio is. Well, in radio astronomy, radio is used to study the starry heavens.

Radio and light are two forms of energy that whiz across the universe at 186,000 miles per second. Light brings us pictures and radio brings us sounds. Astronomers use telescopes to catch the light from distant stars and radio telescopes to catch their sounds. The stars, it seems, are noisy powerhouses and their radio signals reach us from immense distances. Radio telescopes can pick up signals from many stars that are too far away for their light to reach the telescopes.