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How Far Are The Nearest Stars?

Cody'sLab · 3.7M views · 2017-06-20 · 10:22

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Overview

Cody's Lab builds a 200-billionth-scale model to show how far away the nearest stars are, using parallax and light speed. A short astronomy explainer on interstellar distances.

On Hacker News

Recommended whenever threads need an intuition for the vast distances between stars.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2019–2025

Topics

Cosmology & astrophysicsSpace exploration & spaceflight
Search by tags
scale modelalpha centauriastronomyparallaxspace

What people said

7373737373 · 2025-05 · Strong recommendation

My favorite: Cody'sLab's "How far away are the nearest stars": [VIDEO] Also gives an intuition for how incredibly bright stars shine

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andrewstuart · 2023-06 · Recommendation

There's no aliens anywhere near earth. There really aren't. Given the staggering, likely impossible task of traveling between the stars, it's essentially impossible that they'd turn up on a planet with this many people and be so in tune with our technology and media that they manage to stay out of sight entirely, except for some government secret Area 53 base or whatever. If you think that traveling between the stars is even remotely practical then maybe watch this video that illustrates the distance only to the closest star, let alone any further away: [VIDEO]

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andrewstuart · 2023-01 · Recommendation

I believe in aliens from a statistical standpoint. But I don't believe in interstellar travel at all. I don't think people grasp the distances between stars. The longest distance a human has traveled through space is to the moon. If, for scale, this was about 2 millimeters, then the nearest star would be another 200 kilometers/124 miles away. Here's a great video to illustrate [VIDEO] IMO Oumuamua was a rock.

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Sources

Video by Cody'sLab, played through YouTube.

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