The closest star to Earth is the Sun, 8.3 light-minutes away. The closest star after that is Proxima Centauri, a dim red dwarf about 4.24 light-years from us. That’s the short answer. The longer one is more interesting, because the list of closest stars to earth depends on what you’re willing to call a star, and almost every ranking online quietly makes a different choice.
This list makes the choice out loud, uses distances from the Gaia space telescope and the RECONS survey of nearby stars, and tells you which of these neighbors you can actually go outside and see. Last updated: November 2026.
Table of contents
- TLDR
- The closest stars to Earth in one table
- What counts as a star?
- The nearest stars, one by one
- Which nearby stars can you see?
- How we know the distances
- How long would it take to get there?
- FAQ
TLDR
- Closest star: the Sun (150 million km, 8.3 light-minutes).
- Closest star beyond the Sun: Proxima Centauri, 4.24 light-years.
- Closest star system: Alpha Centauri, a trio of Proxima plus the bright pair Alpha Centauri A and B, 4.37 light-years.
- Visible without a telescope within 10 light-years: only Alpha Centauri A/B and Sirius.
- Closest star with confirmed planets: Proxima Centauri, which has at least two.
- Closest brown dwarfs (not true stars): Luhman 16 at 6.5 light-years and WISE 0855 at 7.4.
The closest stars to Earth in one table
Distances are rounded to two decimals. A light-year is about 9.46 trillion km.
| Rank | Object | Distance (light-years) | Spectral type | Naked-eye? | Known planets |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Sun | 0.000016 | G2V | Yes (don’t stare) | 8 |
| 1 | Proxima Centauri | 4.24 | M5.5V red dwarf | No | 2 confirmed, 1 disputed |
| 2 | Alpha Centauri A | 4.37 | G2V | Yes | 1 candidate |
| 2 | Alpha Centauri B | 4.37 | K1V | Yes | None confirmed |
| 3 | Barnard’s Star | 5.96 | M4V red dwarf | No | 4 |
| 4 | Luhman 16 A and B (brown dwarfs) | 6.50 | L7.5 and T0.5 | No | None known |
| 5 | WISE 0855-0714 (brown dwarf) | 7.43 | Y4 | No | None known |
| 6 | Wolf 359 | 7.86 | M6V red dwarf | No | Candidates only |
| 7 | Lalande 21185 | 8.31 | M2V red dwarf | Binoculars | At least 1 |
| 8 | Sirius A | 8.60 | A1V | Yes, brightest star in the night sky | None known |
| 8 | Sirius B | 8.60 | White dwarf | No | None known |
| 9 | Luyten 726-39 A and B | 8.73 | M5.5V and M6V | No | None known |
| 10 | Ross 154 | 9.69 | M3.5V red dwarf | No | None known |
Rank is by system, since stars in a pair share a distance. Within 10 light-years there are 10 systems besides the Sun. They contain 11 true stars besides the Sun (counting the white dwarf Sirius B) and three brown dwarfs.
What counts as a star?
A star fuses ordinary hydrogen in its core. A brown dwarf is too light for that. It can burn a little deuterium for a while, then cools off for the rest of its existence. The dividing line sits near 75 to 80 times the mass of Jupiter.
That’s why rankings disagree. Lists that include Luhman 16 and WISE 0855 are counting the closest objects. Lists that skip them are counting stars. Both are defensible as long as the page says which one it’s doing. This one does: the numbered profiles below include the brown dwarfs, and each is marked as one.
Two more quirks. The Sun is a star, so it technically tops every list, and most sources start the countdown at Proxima for that reason. And a white dwarf like Sirius B counts as a stellar remnant, not a working star, but it still gets called a star in almost every catalog.
The nearest stars, one by one
Proxima Centauri (4.24 light-years)
Proxima is the nearest neighbor and an unimpressive one. It’s a red dwarf with about an eighth of the Sun’s mass, shining at magnitude 11, roughly 100 times too faint to see with the naked eye. It sits in the southern constellation Centaurus and orbits the bright Alpha Centauri pair at a distance of about 0.2 light-years, one lap every 550,000 years or so.
It’s also the best planet target in the neighborhood. Proxima b, found in 2016, orbits every 11.2 days in the star’s habitable zone, with a minimum mass near that of Earth (ESO announcement). A smaller planet, Proxima d, orbits every 5 days. A third signal, Proxima c, remains disputed. The catch: Proxima throws violent flares, so whether anything on Proxima b could hold onto an atmosphere is an open question.
Alpha Centauri A and B (4.37 light-years)
To the eye, Alpha Centauri is one bright star, the third brightest in the night sky. In a small telescope it splits into two. A is nearly a twin of the Sun, a touch bigger and brighter. B is an orange dwarf, a bit smaller and cooler. They form a binary pair that circles each other every 80 years, swinging between roughly the distance of Saturn and Pluto from one another.
Planet hunters have chased this pair for decades because the stars are so close and so Sun-like. In 2025, JWST imaging turned up what looks like a gas giant orbiting A. It still needs follow-up before anyone calls it confirmed.
Barnard’s Star (5.96 light-years)
Barnard’s Star holds the record for the fastest apparent motion across our sky, about 10.4 arcseconds per year. That’s the width of the full Moon every 180 years or so. It’s a faint red dwarf in Ophiuchus, magnitude 9.5, so you need a telescope.
Astronomers have confirmed four planets there, announced in 2025, all smaller than Earth and all on orbits of under a week. They’re far too hot for liquid water. Still, finding four sub-Earth planets around a star this dim shows how sensitive modern radial-velocity measurements have become.
Luhman 16 (6.50 light-years)
Discovered in 2013 in images from NASA’s WISE telescope, Luhman 16 is a pair of brown dwarfs and the third-closest system to the Sun. One is an L-type, the other a T-type, circling each other every few decades. They’re in the southern constellation Vela. Both are among the best-studied brown dwarfs because they’re so close, and astronomers have mapped cloud bands on them.
WISE 0855-0714 (7.43 light-years)
The coldest known brown dwarf, with a temperature close to that of a cold winter day on Earth. It was found in 2014 and is so faint in visible light that it’s practically invisible; infrared telescopes pick it up. It belongs to the rare Y class and lives in the constellation Hydra.
Wolf 359 (7.86 light-years)
A small, faint red dwarf in Leo, barely a tenth of the Sun’s mass. It’s young and flare-prone, and it’s famous mostly because Star Trek sent a doomed Federation fleet there. Radial-velocity data have hinted at planets, but none are confirmed.
Lalande 21185 (8.31 light-years)
The brightest red dwarf in the northern sky and the closest star to the Sun visible from midnorthern latitudes with binoculars. At magnitude 7.5, you’ll find it in Ursa Major if you know where to aim. At least one planet has been detected, a few times Earth’s mass on a roughly 13-day orbit.
Sirius A and B (8.60 light-years)
Sirius is the one everyone knows. It’s the brightest star in the night sky, about 25 times more luminous than the Sun, and it’s in Canis Major, so you can find it by following Orion’s Belt down and to the left. Its companion, Sirius B, is a white dwarf: a collapsed stellar core with about the mass of the Sun packed into something the size of Earth. It’s roughly 10,000 times fainter than Sirius A, which makes it a famously hard target for backyard telescopes.
Luyten 726-39 (8.73 light-years)
Two small red dwarfs in Cetus, close enough to each other to orbit in about 26 years. The fainter one, UV Ceti, gave its name to a whole class of flare stars after it brightened roughly 75-fold in less than a minute in 1952. No planets are known.
Ross 154 (9.69 light-years)
The last of the top ten, a flaring red dwarf in Sagittarius at magnitude 10.4. It’s an easy telescope target in the summer sky and has no confirmed planets. Just past it, Ross 248 (10.3 light-years) and Epsilon Eridani (10.5) round out the next group. Epsilon Eridani is the next naked-eye star on the list.
Which nearby stars can you see?
Out of everything in the table, only two systems are naked-eye objects: Alpha Centauri and Sirius. Most nearby stars are red dwarfs, and red dwarfs are tiny and dim. Proxima Centauri is the closest star to us and still sits about 100 times below what your eyes can detect.
Sirius shows from anywhere on Earth. Alpha Centauri needs a southern sky: it’s easy from Australia, South Africa and South America, and low on the horizon from the southern US, but invisible from most of Europe and Canada. Lalande 21185 is the best binocular target in the north. For the rest, you need a telescope and a good star chart.
When you look at Alpha Centauri tonight, you’re seeing light that left it in 2022. Sirius’s light left in the spring of 2018.
How we know the distances
Astronomers measure nearby stars by parallax. Look at a star in January, and again in July when Earth is on the other side of its orbit. The star appears to shift slightly against the far-off background. The smaller the shift, the farther away the star.
For Proxima Centauri that shift is about 0.77 arcseconds, thinner than a human hair seen from a few meters away. Ground-based telescopes struggled with it for a century. ESA’s Gaia mission measures parallax for more than a billion stars with far better precision, and groups like RECONS, based at Georgia State University, combine Gaia data with ground surveys to build the census of stars near the Sun.
The astronomers’ own unit, the parsec, is about 3.26 light-years. Proxima is 1.30 parsecs away.
How long would it take to get there?
Light covers the distance to Proxima in 4.24 years. Everything we’ve actually built is far slower.
- Voyager 1, travelling at about 17 km/s, would need roughly 75,000 years. It’s not aimed at Proxima, but the speed gives the scale. You can follow its progress on NASA’s Voyager site.
- Parker Solar Probe, at its fastest of about 192 km/s, would still take around 6,600 years.
- A craft at 20% of light speed, the target of the proposed Breakthrough Starshot concept, would do it in about 20 years. Nothing close to that has been built.
The nearest star is roughly 40 trillion km away. That is why the closest stars to earth are still destinations for telescopes rather than probes.
FAQ
What is the closest star to Earth?
The Sun. It’s 150 million km away, or 8.3 light-minutes.
What is the nearest star to the Sun?
Proxima Centauri, at about 4.24 light-years. It’s part of the Alpha Centauri system, which at 4.37 light-years is the closest star system.
Is Alpha Centauri closer than Proxima?
No. Proxima is slightly closer, by about 0.13 light-years, though people often say “Alpha Centauri” when they mean the whole trio.
How far is Alpha Centauri in light-years?
About 4.37 light-years, or roughly 41 trillion km.
Which nearby stars have planets?
Proxima Centauri has two confirmed planets, Barnard’s Star has four, and Lalande 21185 has at least one. Alpha Centauri A has a promising JWST candidate that hasn’t been confirmed.
Do brown dwarfs count as stars?
Not strictly. They never ignite ordinary hydrogen fusion. Luhman 16 and WISE 0855 are the closest brown dwarfs, at 6.5 and 7.4 light-years.
