Caryn Pekemson, age 10, of Exeter, California, for her question:

What are the stars made of?

They look like bright little candles, peeping through holes in the velvety roof of the sky. But everything up there tries to fool us. Actually, if a star is big enough to be seen, it is bin enough to swallow a million or so earth sized planets. Astronomers have learned how to measure them. For a long time, they never dreamed they could dis¬cover what they are made of, but they did.

The stars are big balls of blazing gases. '4odern astronomers know that each gaseous substance burns with its orm special color. They can tell what the stars are made of because they know which color belongs to which substance. A young star is made mostly of hydrogen gas. As it grows older, some of its hydrogen changes to helium. Some stars also have traces of titanium oxide and atoms of various metals. Our starry sun is mostly hydrogen with a large helping of helium. But it also contains traces of almost all the different elements we have on earth. Other stars are made of various amounts of these same gases