Tom Strickland, age 13, of Martinsville, Va., for his queen:

Where is the center of the universe?

The word universe suggests a unified system in which all things are interrelated and work together under the same laws of nature. It must, of course, include everything ‑ our earth and the planets, the sun and the stars and all other heavenly bodies. Our meaning of the word universe has changed through the ages, The telescopes the radio telescope and other instruments are constantly bringing in new information, the answers to old questions which open up still more questions. Our knowledge about the universes its shape and its size, is still growing.

Let ts go back 400 years'. Chances are, you would have had no‑achool for education was only for a lucky few. You would have thought, as most people did, that our earth was the center of the universe. To prove it, you would point to the skies. "See the sun, the moon and all the stars. They go over the earth, down under the earth and over again." You would also have been quite sure that the earth was flat. A few scholars at this time thought the earth might be round, but most of them were sure that the heavens circled around the earth once every 24 hours,

The Polish astronomer Copernicus suggested that the earth and the planets might be circling the sun. In 1610, the great Galileo built a telescope and proved him right. Mankind found it hard to swallow this wonderful discovery. To do so, he had to give up the idea that his little world was the center of the whole universe. Had you been living then, you too would have had to stretch and stretch your mind to grasp the new picture of the Solar System.

Now we know that even the Solar System is but a speck in a huge cart‑wheel system of stars. Galileo saw that the pale Milky Way arching over the sky is the blurry light from countless faraway stars.  It is a view out across the teeming, star‑studded cart‑wheel. Because of this, we call it the Milky Way system. We also call it the Galaxy, a word coined from older words meaning milk and circle. It is also called a spiral nebula, because we know that two starry arms spiral out from the star‑studded canter. And because the vast wheeling system is surrounded by oceans of empty space, we cell it an Island Universe.

Out across the oceans of space there are other islands of staffs. It is estimated that there are a million, million galaxies like bur own. Nowadays, when we think of the entire universe, we must stretch, stretch our minds. For the universe includes all these starry systems.

The center of our Solar System is the suns some 92 million miles away. The center of our Galaxy is about 60 light years away somewhere in the Milky Way. But among the countless galaxies, scattered throughout the vastness of space, where would we look for the center of the universe?