How far away are the stars in sky?

Question

How far away are the stars in sky?

Answer 1

The stars we can see in the sky are all within our galaxy.

Our galaxy has about 200 billion stars, and is over 100,000 light years across.  So there are stars as close as a few light years and as far as 75,000 light years, just in our own galaxy.

The closest star in our sky that you can see with the naked eye is Alpha Centauri, at 4.365 light years (a light year is about 9 trillion kilometers).

The farthest star in our sky that you can see with the naked eye is probably HR 209, apparent magnitude 5.8, distance 48.7 light years.

The farthest actual star is unknown, since there are over 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, all with stars.

Answer 2

Light travels approx. 5,865,696,000,000 (nearly 6 trillion) miles per year. Since the nearest star, other than the sun, is about 4.2 light-years away, it is about 23,462,784,000,000 miles away. And that's just the closest one. There are stars out there estimated to be billions of light years away.

Answer 3

We are .000016 light years (93 million miles) from our sun (the nearest star).

Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light years from Earth. Some twenty other "close" stars can be found here:

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

Answer 4

It would take light 8 minutes to travel from the closest star (our Sun) to us

It would take about 13 billion years for the stars on the edge of the universe to travel to us.

In short, they're anywhere from 8 light-minutes to 13 billion light-years away.

-John

Answer 5

The distances vary. The nearest of the stars at night are just over 4 light years away. The farthest you can see are thousands of light years away.

A light year is the distance light travels in a year, about 6 trillion miles (speed of light is about 186,000 miles per second, or 300,000 km per second). To give you an idea, the distance from Earth to sun is about 93 million miles or 150 million km -- that's about 400 times farther than the moon -- and if that distance from earth to sun were an inch on a scale model, then a light year would be a MILE (1.6 km), and the nearest star would be over four miles from our solar system. The stars are truly astonishingly far away!

Answer 6

If you shrank the Sun to the size of a grain of sand, and the Earth to the size of a dust mote, the nearest stars would be 10 miles away.

Answer 7

As far as the stars which can be seen without a telescope, the closer ones are about a handful of light years away to a handful of thousands of light years.

Proxima Centauri is just over 4 LY away, closest.

Of reasonably bright stars, there is Deneb, 19th brightest, is about 3200 LY away.  There are other fainter ones which would be a bit farther.  There are about six thousand stars bright enough to be seen without a telescope, in a dark sky (the whole sky).  Distance to all of these has not yet been established.