David Dial, age 8, of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, for his question:

Why does the sun have spots?

This is somewhat of a mystery. But most likely it has something to do with the sun's fiery furnace. It is an enormous atomic furnace, not at all like an ordinary fire. It is far more fierce than the furnace in an atomic power plant. The mighty H bomb is just a tiny sample of what goes on in the sun. So when we talk about sunspots, we must mean something super special. No wonder they are hard to explain.

Experts think they may be wild upheavals that start 'way down deep in the sun's fiery furnace. When they erupt on the surface they make it cooler. They also shoot forth flaming flares, thousands of miles high. They upset the sun's magnetic field  and shoot out invisible streamers that upset the Earth's magnetic field. This may be why some experts call sunspots magnetic storms. Someday we may learn just what causes them to happen.