Gloria a. Rice, age l2, of Livingston, Tex., for her question:

Do stars really twinkle?

Stars do not twinkle, and yet in a way they do. Each star is a blazing bonfire of nuclear fury that shoots immense flares and fiery streamers out into space. Its round surface danceb with darting flames. But a star is too far away for us to see this changing spectacle, and the twinkling we see on earth has nothing to do with it.

The earth's atmosphere of teeming gas molecules plays tricks on light beams on their way down to the ground. It paints the day sky blue and causes the darting sparkles that twinkle from a golden star. This twinkling is not done by the distant star, but by a few miles of gaseous air above the earth.