Martha DeBrodyr age 12 of Williamsport, Penna, for her question:

How far is the nearest star from the earth?

The star nearest to us is about 31,005,000 miles away. It shines in the daytimes in fact, it gives us our daylight, It is of course our own special stars the sun. Its light! traveling at 186,000 miles second takes somewhat more than eight minutes to reach us, The next nearest stars are 3,000,000 times further away from us than our sun. Their lights traveling at the same break  neck speed, takes over four years to reach us. They are about four and one half light years away.

Let's scale the sizes and the distances of the stars down to a models then shrink our golden sun to the size of a golden apricot and put it in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Its sparest apricot star neighbors would be 500 miles away in Cincinnati one in front of the main Post Office and one two blocks north on our model twenty five miles from the Cincinnati twins would be a small star the size of a grain of sand.

Now, let’s put them back and look for them in the sky. Since our earth is a ball each side of it faces a different view of the vast reaches of star filled outer space. Our nearest stars appear in the view of the heavens seen from the southern hemisphere.

Alpha Centauri appears in a constellation called the Centaur, near the Southern Cross though we see it only as one star, telescopes reveal it to be a double star of the two which we showed as the Cincinnati twins, Light from Alpha Centaurs takes over four and one half years to reach us.  It is over 27 million million miles light years away.

Near Alpha Centaurs is a faint star called Proxima, thought to be slightly closer to us.    Shown as the grain of sand, we might have tom put it on the Philadelphia side of Cincinnati. Since these stars must be seen from the southern hemisphere let’s find a close star in our northern skies.

That is easy   for we shall pick the brightest star to be seen anywhere from this planet, It is Sirius, the Dog Star, and it sparkles in our winter skies like a glittering diamond. Telescopes reveal that it, too, is a double star. One huge star and one small one revolve about each other„ The small star has been named the Pup. Bright Sirius is about 8,6 light years, or well over 50 millions of millions of miles away from us,

On our scale model Sirius would be an apricot 1,000 miles from our sun apricot in Philadelphia and in a different direction from the Cincinnati group„ We might put it on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland or on the beach at Miami, Florida. Plenty of room in that fruit bowl   plenty of space between the stars.