Hark Woleslagle, ale 3, of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, for his question:

How many stars are in the Universe?

On a clear night, a person with sharp eyes could count about 2,000 stars, spread over the entire sky. But these are just the few stars that happen to be in our small corner of the Universe. Telescopes can see much farther than we can. And they prove that there are millions and billions and trillions more stars out there in the Universe.

On a starry night, sometimes you can see a pale, hazy scarf trailing up and over the sky. We call it the Nily Way. A beginner's telescope shows us that the Milky Way is crowded with stars. They are so far away that they blur together and we cannot see them one by one. Astronomers tell us that our Milky Way is an enormous wheel of about 100 billion stars. They have found thousands more galaxies out in space and most of them are teeming with stars. Nobody knows how many more galaxies there are, so nobody can say how many stars there are in the entire Universe.