the.com/stellar neighborhoods
the cosmic version of knowing which houses on your block have suspicious basement noises.
means the local region of space around the sun containing stars close enough to map, study, and worry about gravitationally.
from astronomers started cataloging nearby stars by parallax in the 19th century, and as distances got measurable the sky stopped being a flat backdrop and became a neighborhood with actual addresses and distances.
nearest neighborproxima centauri sits just 4.24 light-years away
local bubblethe sun sits inside a giant hollowed-out gas cavity
crowded pasta star may have passed through our oort cloud 70,000 years ago
future visitorgliese 710 will drift uncomfortably close in 1.3 million years
for instance
alpha centauri system — closest star system, three stars, 4.37 light-years out
local bubble — low-density cavity carved by ancient supernovae around the sun
sirius — brightest star in our sky, 8.6 light-years away
gould belt — ring of young star-forming regions a few hundred light-years wide