Richard Kren, age 11, of Cleveland, Ohio, for his question:

How high up do the sun’s flames shoot?

The sun’s most spectacular flames are flares and prominences that shoot up from the surface into the atmosphere. They erupt spasmodically in the neighborhood of sunspot disturbances and frequently spurt up to 30,000 or 50,000 miles. Larger ones go much higher. On June 4, 1946, a record prominence erupted and reached a height of 1,050,000 miles. This distance is more than the diameter of the sun itself.

The life span of a solar flare usually may be measured in minutes. It may spurt up at 500 to 1,000 miles per second and then spread forth a billion square miles of blazing gases. Almost at once, its fiery filaments begin arching down to the surface. The life of a monster prominence may last for hours. It rises in thin jets, often so hard to detect that the blazing canopy aloft seems to materialize from nothing. Its blazing gases often spread several hundreds of thousands of miles, with ragged edges streaming down like cosmic firework displays.