Vivek Bahl, age 8, of Benson, Arizona, for her question:

How hot are the stars?

Nothing in our world ever gets as hot as a star. So the heat of a blazing star is very hard for us to imagine. On earth we use a very hot blast furnace to melt steel. Such a hot fire would scorch you to ashes in a second. Its temperature may be 3,000 degrees. This seems terrifically hot to us. But inside a hot blazing star, one of our hot furnaces would seem to be very cold indeed.

The blazing stars come in different sizes, different colors and different temperatures. The surface of the coolest stars is about 5,500 degrees Fahrenheit, which is almost twice as hot as our hot blast furnaces. Some of the whitish stars are 20,000 degrees and some are saying hot as 30,000 degrees. A blue white star may be hotter than 55,000 degrees. And all those stars are much hotter down in the center. The surface of our fiery sun is about 11,000 degrees Fahrenheit. But scientists suspect that its seething heart reaches millions of degrees.