Explore the 10 nearest stars
If you want to study the stars, there’s no better place to start than close to home. After all, the nearest star is just 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) away: the Sun. Its daily presence and predictable motions through the sky may make it seem like a boring, steady companion. But up close, it’s an incendiary tempest of roiling plasma, erupting with brilliant solar flares and mottled by darker sunspots — not to mention it’s the only star known (so far) to host a planetary system that includes an inhabited world.
An estimated 200 billion trillion or so stars fill the known cosmos, but nearby stars attract a lot of attention from astronomers. “We are somehow attached naturally to things that are close by, to finding out what’s going on right next door,” says astronomer Rodrigo Díaz at the National University of San Martín in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who has helped discover planets that orbit nearby stars. “We grow up in a neighborhood, and as we grow, we expand our sphere of familiarity and go bigger and bigger and bigger.”