David Sandige, age 8, of Westfir, Oregon, for his question:

What really are tektites?

If you like collecting and sorting rocks, you might mistake a tektite for a meteorite fallen from the sky. The glassy stone may be shaped like a ball or a smooth tear drop or a neat dumbbel. Large ones are a few inches wide small ones measure about half an inch. However, they are not true meteorites because they are made of different materials. Scientists are very interested in tektites, but at present they do not agree about how they were formed.

Some say they were formed when giant meteorites crashed to earth, melting and shattering our rocks. The gobs of molten material got twisted into strange shapes as they flew through the air, then cooled and became solid tektites. Other experts suggest that tektites came from the moon, when it was struck by a monster meteorite. Large and small gobs of liquid lunar rock may have been blasted out into space. Some may have landed on earth as tektites. Some may have broken off from larger chunks of shattered lunar material, and landed here later