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the Sun's neighbourhood
Our neighbouring stars
Most neighbouring stars are small red dwarfs that cannot be seen with the naked eye. The Sun is among the brightest 10% of stars in the Milky Way.
Key figures
- Nearest star
- Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light-years
- Stars within 20 ly
- about 100
- Most common stars
- red dwarfs (about three quarters)
- Light from Proxima
- takes 4 years and 3 months
Interesting facts
- Many neighbouring stars have planets – some of them in the zone where liquid water would be possible.
How are distances to stars measured?
Hold a finger in front of your nose and close one eye, then the other: the finger jumps back and forth. Nearby stars “jump” a little in just the same way as the Earth moves along its orbit around the Sun. From this tiny jump (the parallax) the distance is worked out.
The nearest stars
| Star | Distance | What makes it special |
|---|---|---|
| Proxima Centauri | 4.24 light-years | The nearest star of all: a small red dwarf. At least one Earth-sized planet, Proxima b, orbits it. It cannot be seen with the naked eye. |
| Alpha Centauri A and B | 4.37 light-years | A double star made up of two Sun-like stars – together with Proxima, a triple system. Not visible from Switzerland because it lies too far south. |
| Barnard's Star | 5.96 light-years | A red dwarf that moves across the sky faster than any other star: the width of a full Moon in 180 years. |
| Luhman 16 | 6.5 light-years | Two brown dwarfs – “failed stars”, too small to shine properly. Only discovered in 2013. |
| Wolf 359 | 7.86 light-years | One of the faintest stars known. Science-fiction fans know it from “Star Trek”. |
| Lalande 21185 | 8.31 light-years | The brightest red dwarf in the northern sky – but still only visible with binoculars. |
| Sirius A and B | 8.6 light-years | The brightest star in the night sky. Its companion Sirius B is a white dwarf: as heavy as the Sun, but only as big as Earth. |
| Luyten 726-8 (UV Ceti) | 8.73 light-years | Two red dwarfs that sometimes become many times brighter within minutes in tremendous outbursts of radiation. |
| Ross 154 | 9.7 light-years | Red dwarf in the constellation Sagittarius. |
| Epsilon Eridani | 10.5 light-years | A young, Sun-like star with a disc of dust and at least one giant planet – almost like a young Solar System. |
| Ross 128 | 11 light-years | A quiet red dwarf with an Earth-sized planet. |
| 61 Cygni | 11.4 light-years | The first star to have its distance measured: by Friedrich Bessel in 1838. For the first time, people knew how far away the stars are. |
| Procyon | 11.46 light-years | Bright star in Canis Minor, with a white dwarf as a companion. |
| Epsilon Indi | 11.9 light-years | An orange star with a giant planet and two brown dwarfs. |
| Tau Ceti | 11.9 light-years | A star very similar to the Sun – a popular target in the search for extraterrestrial life. |
| Luyten's Star | 12.4 light-years | Red dwarf with a planet in the habitable zone. In 2017 a radio message containing music was sent to it. |
| Teegarden's Star | 12.5 light-years | A tiny red dwarf with two Earth-like planets. |
| Altair | 16.7 light-years | A bright star of the Summer Triangle. It spins so fast that it is flattened. |
| Vega | 25 light-years | The brightest star of the summer sky, in Lyra – in 12,000 years it will be our pole star. |
| Fomalhaut | 25.1 light-years | Surrounded by a vast ring of dust, which the James Webb Space Telescope has photographed. |
| Pollux | 33.8 light-years | An orange giant star in Gemini, with a giant planet. |
| Arcturus | 36.7 light-years | A red giant, 25 times as wide as the Sun – the brightest star in the northern sky. |
| TRAPPIST-1 | 40.7 light-years | A tiny red dwarf with seven Earth-sized planets – some of them could have water. |
| Capella | 42.9 light-years | Actually two yellow giant stars orbiting each other. |
Where is it?
Our neighbouring stars belongs to the “Our neighbouring stars” level of the Cosmic Zoom (field of view about 90 light-years). The nearest stars around the Sun. The blue shell around the Sun is the Oort Cloud – the outermost edge of our Solar System. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year: 9.5 trillion kilometres.
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