Thomas Russell, age 7, of Petersburg, Virginia, for his question:

Are the stars really pointed?

It's not safe to look straight at the starry sun. But it's all right to stare at the stars that come out after the sun goes to bed. If you choose a fairly bright one, you may watch it twinkle. Now and then it seems to shoot off points of light. From this you might decide that a star really is pointed. But please remember that things up in the sky tend to fool us. Actually those sparkling points are not what they seem to be.

We gaze at the sky through hundreds of miles of filmy air. And the air plays tricks with the light that comes from the faraway stars. It makes them sparkle and twinkle and points of light seem to shoot off in all directions. But these twinkling points do not belong to the real stars. Actually, the real faraway stars are big round balls of blazing gases. The sparkling points are added by the air around the planet Earth