Ricky Patrick, age 12, of Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, for his question:

 Is it possible to see other solar systems?

Our best telescopes cannot photograph planets beyond our solar system. But scien¬tists have verified them by other means. A planet and its sun orbit around the center of their combined masses. This point is far from the light weight planet and usually inside its massive sun. As the planet swings around its wide orbit, the motion of its sun is merely a wobble. Such wobbles have been detected in neighboring stars and we now know that eight of them have at least one dark, orbiting planet. And, where there is one planet, there is likely to be a whole solar system.

The distance of these solar systems ranges from six to 25 light years. Even the largest planet is beyond the reach of our best telescopes. And at present, small and medium sized planets cannot be detected by other means. The one nearest to our solar system is 1.5 times as massive as our giant Jupiter. Someday, no doubt, we shall be able to detect smaller planets in these and other systems and, who knows, someday we may have telescopes powerful enough to photograph them