The 5 Nearest Stars
A flight out to our five closest stellar neighbours, farthest to closest, with real galactic bearings and what we know about their planets.
▶ Premiering soon on Instagram & YouTube
The story
Our Sun has neighbours, and they're closer than most people think — but "close" in the galaxy still means staggeringly far. This is a flight out to the five nearest star systems, taken farthest-first so each leg feels longer than the last, then zooming back to the Sun between stops.
Sirius, the brightest star in our sky, sits 8.6 light-years away; then the faint red dwarfs Lalande 21185 and Wolf 359; then fast-moving Barnard's Star; and finally Alpha Centauri at 4.37 light-years, home to Proxima Centauri and its habitable-zone planet Proxima b. The directions on screen are mapped to the stars' real galactic-plane bearings, and the panels show what we actually know about each one's planets.