Matt Flory, age 7, of Atlanta, Ga., for his question:

EXACTLY HOW HOT IS THE SUN?

Our sun is a blazing star and naturally nobody has actually been there to take its temperature. But scientists have other clever ways to figure out how hot it is. They know how hot it is on the surface. But the big ball of blazing gases gets hotter and hotter toward the center.

We are told that the sun's surface temperature is around 11,000 deg. Fahrenheit. Imagine, this is more than three times hotter than the furious furnaces we use to make steel. True, the sun's surface is perhaps 2,000 degrees cooler in them center of a large sunspot. But it gets hotter down below and maybe the very core may be as hot as 27 million degrees.