The light of your birth
Twelve stars, one by one
Your light passes eighty-six stars charted on the plate. Most are a name, a distance and nothing more worth saying. These twelve are the exceptions — the nearest, the first ever measured, the one that proved a kind of dead star exists, the one a spacecraft is aimed at.
Sorted by distance: the order your light actually reaches them in.
- 4.25 lyProxima CentauriWhat is the closest star to us, and could anything live there?
- 4.37 lyAlpha Centauri AWhat would our nearest neighbouring sun look like from a planet going round it?
- 5.96 lyBarnard's StarWhich star moves fastest across our sky, and why did it fool astronomers for decades?
- 8.60 lySiriusWhy is the brightest star in our sky also the reason we know white dwarfs exist?
- 11.40 ly61 CygniWhich star's distance was measured first, and how do you measure one at all?
- 11.91 lyTau CetiWhich nearby star is most like the Sun, and why was it the first we listened to?
- 14.07 lyVan Maanen's StarWhat does the nearest dead star tell us about what happens to planets?
- 25.04 lyVegaWhy was one particular star chosen as the zero point for brightness?
- 36.71 lyArcturusWhy is this bright star moving the wrong way through the galaxy?
- 40.66 lyTRAPPIST-1Where are there seven Earth-sized planets around one star?
- 65.30 lyAldebaranWhich star is a spacecraft heading for, and why is it not part of the cluster it appears to sit in?
- 90.00 lyAlgolWhy did a star get named after a demon, and what is a deaf teenager doing in the story?