Peter Church, age 9, of South Murray,Utah, for his question:

Is it true that the North Star really moves?

The North Star has been hanging up there in the same spot for as long as you can remember. It has been right there for hundreds of years and scientists tell us that it will make no noticeable changes for hundreds of years to come. Nevertheless, these same experts insist that the North Star is moving    at a terrific speed. In fact, every star in the sky is whizzing at a terrific speed through the heavens. Of course we know that most stars rise and set. They seem to move over our sky because our globe is spinning around like a top. But these are not the real star paths. Their real paths are so immense that the stars seem to go slowly when actually they are dashing along at many thousands of miles an hour.

                 All the stars we see in the sky belong in a great system called the Galaxy. The great Galaxy    is shaped somewhat like a wheel and like a wheel it spins around and around. All its 100 billion stars spin around with it and one of them is our North Star. In a few thousand years it will pull ahead of some of its neighboring stars and lag behind others. Then we shall see it from a different angle and it will not hang up there in the same spot all the time.