Question 1

What does the immediate neighbourhood look like?

Accepted Answer

Mostly faint. The stars within a few dozen light years are overwhelmingly red dwarfs, and not one of them can be seen without a telescope — which is a fair summary of the galaxy rather than an accident of this list.

Question 2

How are these distances known?

Accepted Answer

By parallax, and for most of them by the Gaia spacecraft: the apparent shift of a star against the far background as the Earth moves from one side of its orbit to the other. It is pure geometry, and for the nearest stars it is good to a fraction of a per cent.

Question 3

How is the distance measured?

Accepted Answer

By parallax where the object is near enough — the shift in its apparent position as the Earth crosses its orbit, which is geometry and needs no assumptions. Beyond that, distance is inferred from how bright something of known luminosity appears, and the further out the ladder goes the more the uncertainty grows.

Question 4

How firm is the order?

Accepted Answer

Firmer at the top than at the bottom. Neighbouring rows often sit inside each other's error bars, so a swap between two adjacent entries is a revision rather than a correction. Each object's own page carries the figure with its uncertainty and the method it came from.

Question 5

Why are some stars missing?

Accepted Answer

Because this catalogue holds no distance for them. A row with an empty distance column cannot be ranked on it, so the list is the nearest of those measured rather than the nearest that exist.

Question 6

Which star is closest to the Sun?

Accepted Answer

Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf 4.25 light years away, bound to the bright pair Alpha Centauri A and B. It is far too faint to see with the naked eye despite being the nearest star there is.

Question 7

How long would it take to get there?

Accepted Answer

With present spacecraft, tens of thousands of years. Voyager 1, the fastest thing ever launched from Earth, covers about one light year every 18,000 years — and it is not heading that way.

Question 8

Do the nearest stars have planets?

Accepted Answer

Several do. Proxima Centauri has at least two, one of them roughly Earth-sized and in the temperature range where liquid water is possible, though a red dwarf's flares make that a much harsher place than the distance alone suggests.

The nearest stars to Earth

COMMON QUESTIONS