Solar Neighbourhood
Our charted neighbourhood — 54 charted star systems, all within about 67 light-years of the Sun. It is a tiny patch of the Orion Arm (zoom out to see the arm, with its nebulae and dust), which is itself a minor spiral arm of the Milky Way — the barred spiral galaxy, ~100,000 light-years across, that contains the Sun and every star visible to the naked eye. Because we sit inside the Galaxy, its whole shape is reconstructed from star counts and models, never photographed from outside.
Key facts
Science
Classification
- What this is
- Our charted stellar neighbourhood — a tiny patch of the Orion Arm
- Extent
- ~67 light-years from the Sun · the volume of the 54 systems charted here
- Within
- The Orion Arm of the Milky Way, ~27,000 ly from the galactic centre
Our closest neighbours
- Nearest system
- Alpha Centauri — 4.37 light-years
- Nearest star
- Proxima Centauri — 4.24 light-years
- Brightest in our sky
- Sirius — 8.6 light-years
Charted here
- Star systems mapped
- 54 · charted systems, out to ~67 light-years
- Zoom out to
- the Orion Arm · our spiral arm, with its nebulae, clusters and dust
How we know
- Note
- This is our real charted neighbourhood — 54 charted systems at their true distances (their on-screen layout is a readable symbolic spiral; the light-year labels are the truth). It sits inside the Milky Way, whose whole shape we can only reconstruct from the inside, never photograph from outside.
Discovery & history
- Method
- Naked-eye star
- Name
- 'Milky Way' translates the Latin Via Lactea, itself from the Greek galaxías kýklos, 'milky circle' — the pale band the galaxy's combined starlight makes across the night sky. The word 'galaxy' shares the same root.
The Milky Way's soft band of light was resolved into countless faint stars by Galileo's telescope in 1610. In 1785 William Herschel mapped its rough shape by counting stars in every direction; in 1918 Harlow Shapley used globular clusters to show the Sun lies far from the center. The 1920s 'Great Debate' and Edwin Hubble's measurement of distances to the Andromeda 'nebula' settled that the Milky Way is one galaxy among billions — reshaping humanity's place in the cosmos.
Images
Images from open archives · credit shown per image