Candy Williard, age 9, of Winston Salem, N.C., for her questions

What makes a star fall from the sky?

Many of Andy's young friends worry about losing the beautiful stars in this way. But actually it does not happen at all. If you count the bright stars before and after that shiny shooting star seemed to fall to earth, you would find they were all still up there. The great stars are all big enough to swallow our world a million times and they can never fall out of their proper places in the sky.

The so called shooting star is really a meteor. It may be no bigger than a grain of sand and for countless ages it was a lonely space traveler in the Solar System. Then it crashed towards the earth and came falling down through the atmosphere. The air heated it up and set it on fire. As a rule, it burns to ashes long before it reaches the groixnd. What we see is its fiery path as it falls.