Closest star

[Red86]

I was just wondering, what is the closest star to us? Apart from our own sun, of course.

Does anybody know?

edit: lol, I just found it while reading the article on Brown Dwarfs.
"We might even find a cool brown dwarf that is closer to us than Proxima Centauri, the closest known star"

So, to not let this topic go to waste, what's the closest star with planets around it?

 

[orionrider]

Did you take the time to google 'closest star with planets'?

 

[ramparts]

Wiki is useful for this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ex ... Data_Table

And click the button under "distance" to sort by that. Epsilon Eridani (10.5 light years away) is the closest star with a candidate planet, but that planet is inconsistent with observations showing an asteroid belt around the same distance from the star. The closest star with confirmed planets is Gliese 876 (15.3 light years away), which actually has four that we know about - since it's so close, it's easier for us to detect some of the smaller planets. But of course, there might very well be planets around stars closer to us, which we just haven't discovered yet!

 

[nimbus]

"The close approach of stars in the solar neighbourhood", Robert A J Matthews, 1994 Q.J.R. astr. Soc.

A parsec is roughly 3.25 light years.
http://onlineconversion.com/length_all.htm
How a parsec is measured:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsec

 

[EarthlingX]

You might like this too :

http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/12lys.html

Closest star will very likely change in the near future :

SDC : Coldest Known Failed Stars Found

http://www.centauri-dreams.org : Numerous Nearby Brown Dwarfs?

news.discovery.com : Smaller Planets Rule the Galaxy

SDC Thread : The Kepler Mission

 

[BlackHoleAndromeda]

Did you take the time to google 'closest star with planets'?

Good point, but :roll: . I don't know the name of the closest star to us, but I do know that it's 2.4 trillion miles from Earth.

 

[nimbus]

That's a job for vocabulary. E.G. Google "solar neighbourhood" yields at least one excellent resource. "Nearest stars" also answers the question well enough.

And I'm not a native english speaker.

 

[alphonsebelly]

The Sun is important to Earth for the obvious reason that we all our light and heat. Not so close to the Sun, Earth would be frozen, lifeless, a dark place. And indeed, it is fair to say that the sun is near the Earth. Better to say that the Earth is near the sun. The Sun is much bigger than Earth.