Proxima Centauri

The closest star to our Sun — but still about 40 trillion km away!

Also called: the nearest star to the sun.

🕒 When can I see it?🚀 Travel there

Proxima Centauri — Drawn, not photographed.

What it is

Closest star to the Sun, a small dim red dwarf, too faint to see without a telescope.

Star: A ball of gas heavy enough to fuse hydrogen in its core. Every kind of thing there is →

How to find Proxima Centauri

Look in the constellation Centaurus.

Too far south to see from most of the Northern Hemisphere.

Star-hop: Faint and easily lost in Alpha Centauri's glare: a 6-inch scope, a dark sky and a chart.

Finding it: Right beside Alpha Centauri.

The Planetarium works out where it actually is from your own place and the date — including whether it is above the horizon at all tonight.

Show me Proxima Centauri in tonight's sky

What you will really see

Through a small telescope, on a good night

A bright point of light — even big telescopes can't show a star as a disc.

Honest, not glamorous — why the pictures here are drawn.

🔭 See it drawn as it looks through a telescope

Worth knowing about Proxima Centauri

In weight, only about 1/8 as massive as the Sun. If the Milky Way's 100,000-light-year width were shrunk to fit a 100-meter running track, Proxima Centauri would be about 4 millimetres from the Sun -- roughly the length of a grain of rice. Light takes 4.2 Earth years to get here from Proxima Centauri, so what you are looking at is Proxima Centauri as it was 4.2 Earth years ago.

How bright it is: So dim it puts out only a tiny fraction of the Sun's light -- even up close, it would look far dimmer than our Sun does from Earth.
What it is made of: A small, dim red dwarf star -- cool, low-mass, much fainter than the Sun.
How far away it is: The closest star to the Sun, and still so far that its light takes over four years to reach us.; How we know: Distance measured by parallax: photographing the star from opposite sides of Earth's orbit six months apart. Rung 5 — the distance to the stars
What makes it worth knowing: Too faint to see without a telescope despite being our nearest stellar neighbor.