Rose Wight, age 9, of Algonac, Michigan, for her question:

How big is an average star?

Our sun is an average star    and its size is enormous. If its inside were hollow, it could swallow up a million earth sized planets and still have plenty of room to hold 300,000 more. This is the sun's volume, which is the measure of how much space it takes up. So we may say that the volume of an average star is more than a million times greater than the volume of our little world. We also can measure .the diameter of the sun. This is a line through the middle from side to side. The sun's diameter is 865,000 miles. The earth's diameter is only about 8,000 miles. So we may say that the average star is more than 100 times wider than our world.

The sun doesn't seem this big to us. But it is 93 million miles away and faraway things look smaller. The faraway stars look like pinpoints. But the biggest ones are millions of times bigger than the sun. The smallest stars are no bigger than the earth and we cannot see them without a telescope.