Ricky Hux, age 15, of Timmonsville, South Carolina, for his question:

Does the sun rotate on an axis?

The stylish shape for sizable heavenly bodies is spherical and so far as we know all of them rotate on their axes. Our sun is an average star and no exception to these celestial rules. Stellar rotation seems amazing because stars are made of gases and gases as a rule, tend to waft around in all directions. However, the sun exerts forceful traffic regulations that keep its seething gases in perpetual rotation.

A rash of sunspots crosses our side of the sun in about two weeks. If this solar storm center were traveling under its own power, its speed would be about 8,000 miles per hour. However, this motion is not what it appears to be. Actually, the smudgy feature on the dazzling face of the sun is rotating around the circumference. Two weeks later, chances are it will reappear at the opposite edge as it circles around with the entire surface of the sun.

Sunspots, prominences and other solar features reveal that the sun does indeed rotate. It turns toward the east around an axis tilted 80 degrees and the surface completes a somewhat irregular circuit in about four earth weeks. The irregularity is due to the gaseous nature of the sun. The sun's seething gases rotate fastest at the equator and lag behind between the equator and the poles of the solar axis. The equatorial belt circles faster than latitudes farther north and south.

The solar equator completes each rotation in 24.64 earth days. Since we can observe only half the surface at a time, this half of the equator crosses our view in about 12 and 1/3 days. At latitudes 20 degrees north and south, the rotation period is 25.19 earth days and at latitudes 40 degrees it is 27.48 days. Most sunspots occur within these north and south latitudes. Hence, from our point of view, they seem to cross from side to side of the sun in about two weeks. At latitudes 60 degrees, solar rotation ,lags to 30.93 days and at 90 degrees the rotation period sags to,34 earth daye,

This rotation pattern seems irregular    until we recall the rebel3.io~us _rAI:ure of the earth's gases. However, the solar gases are condensed and the total density of the sun is 1.4 times the density of water. The sun's enormous mass and mighty gravity are strong enough to mold its seething gases firmly to its spherical surface. There they rotate as the entire sun rotates on its axis. But their speeds lag behind as the rotation speed diminishes between the solar equator and the axis poles.

Compared with the earth, the seething sun is enormous in every feature. Its 865,000 mile diameter is 109 times wider and its volume is great enough to engulf about 1 and 1/3 million earth sized planets. Its total mass is about one third of a million times greater and its surface gravity is 28 times greater. All these and other factors unite to create the particular pattern of the sun's surface rotation.