Debra Kiefer, age 10, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, for her question:

How big are the stars?

On our little planet, there are golf balls and footballs, huge beach balls and enormous ball shaped balloons. So it is with the stars, though everything Out There is on a much grander scale. There are dwarf stars, giant stars and supergiants. Though these types are minority groups. Most of them are medium stars like our sun    and the sun is big enough to swallow our world a million times, leaving plenty of room for dessert.

Some of the dwarf stars are not much bigger than the earth, and some may be even smaller. Not long ago they found another group of strange little stars that seem to be just a few miles wide. The giant stars are really whoppers. Some are a million times bigger than our sun. If we replaced the sun with a supergiant star, it would spread way out through the inside half of the Solar System. Little Mercury would be engulfed, so would Venus, the Earth and Mars. Such a star could reach out beyond Jupiter almost as far as Saturn.