Chip Hedrick, age 8, of Oak Hill, T°1. Virginia, for his question:

How many stars can the Milky Way hold?

Sometimes on a very clear night, you can see a piece of the Milky Way up there among the stars. Tonight, the pointer stars in the Bib Dipper may shoe you where to look. They point to the North Star    and the same pointing line leads on to a milky white patch of the Miky Way. It is a pale ghostly glimmer, somewhat like a thin filmy scarf in the sky. Actually its light comes from a crowd of faraway stars.

We see only small pieces of the Milky I lay from afar. The whole thing is an enormous wheel made of stars and streaming clouds of cases. 'Nobody has counted all the stars one by one. But scientists have figured out how many stars the :Milky `Way can hold more or less. The answer is about one hundred billion. You can write down this fantastic number of stars with a figure one   and a string of eleven zeros.