Maybe it isn't a question of questions, but a question of thoughts?
Hypothesis: Her answer to "What is a star?" is a great answer, presuming that in her mind there were three or four sentences prior to the one that ended up on paper. Or the answer to the question about the answer to the question about the answer... etc. So, her mind is a mini-freight train speeding along and she is standing five feet away and trying to take a picture of it. One time it is only a boxcar, another a coal car and so on.
So "What is a star?"
"It's a glowing dot in the nightsky. OK, really it is an energy factory that's pretty large. But they only seem small because they are far away. However the sun is also a star. So... We see one at day and night."
If this hypothesis is right, then either learning to step back further from the freight train or having a wider aperture might be needed. Thinking the stepping back is developing introspective skills (maturity and like your ...because... method.) And picturing "aperture" more like dysgraphia issues where the need to produce the written output supresses a certain amount of the working memory content.