Billy Joe Ledford, age 10, of Gastonia, N.C., or is question:

Can we see stars that died long ago?

We see the stars from the light which comes to us. Though light is the fastest traveler known, it does take time to cover distance. It takes about one year to travel a distance of six million, million miles. The light from our sun travels at the same speed. The sunbeam that hits your nose started out from the sun some eight minutes ago.

The nearest star we can see north of the equator is Sirius, whose . light takes more than eight years to reach us. When we look at Sirius, we see it as it was more than eight years ago. Some of the stars are hundreds of light years away. So we see them, not as they are, but as they were. If one of these stars disappeared, or more likely blazed up to become a big nova, we would not know about it for several hundred years. We would get the news only as fast .as speeding light can carry it.