Pam Ledford, age 10, of Gastonia, N.C., for her question:

IS THE SUN REALLY INSIDE THE MILKY WAY?

When you walk through the woods, you see trees on every side. But this is no place to get a true picture of the entire forest. In a way, we can compare the forest to the heavens around us. The separate stars become trees and the major part of the forest is the Milky Way, which we see as a pale arch looping over the sky. And one of the stars in this starry forest is our very own friendly neighborhood sun.

The Milky Way is a great cartwheel of circling stars ¬and one of its 100 billion stars is the sun.  From the earth, we get a flat edgewise view of the big wheel, as we gaze out across its crowded center. The sun is about two thirds of the distance from the center toward the outer rim. And all the other stars we see from the earth are strewn around in more or less the same region of the Milky Way.