Besides the sun, what is the nearest star to us?

Besides the sun, the nearest star is proxima centauri, Alpha Centauri, whose middle name is Nanmener.

Proxima Centauri is the third star of Alpha Centauri, which is also called Alpha Centauri C according to Bayer nomenclature. It is the closest star to the solar system (4.22 light years). It was discovered by astronomer Robert Innes when he was in South Africa in 19 15, when he was the director of the Johannesburg Joint Observatory.

Nanmener is one of the early stars that used parallax method to calculate the actual distance. Actually, it's a triad. One of the eleven stars, named proxima centauri in the west, is the closest star to the solar system. We call it proxima centauri.

Proxima centauri's three sub-stars cooperate with each other, so in different historical periods, the world's "closest" crown will be worn by these three stars in turn.

Proxima centauri is a red dwarf star, located 2 degrees southwest of the earth. The little red star in the center of the picture below is proxima centauri, which is very dim. It was not discovered in South Africa until 19 15 by Robert innis, then director of the Johannesburg Joint Observatory. All kinds of stars in our galaxy can be seen in the background of the image. The brightest star in Nanmen II system is similar to our sun and the third brightest star in the night sky. Astronomers in Europe announced that they had found a planet with similar mass to the Earth around the nearest star (except the sun). This discovery opens a new era of exploration of exoplanets, a brand-new world different from other solar systems. Although this planet will never be the second earth, because it is too close to the star and is constantly baked at high temperature. If Liu's famous sci-fi masterpiece "Three-body" is right, then the three-body man with dehydration function and tenacious survival is suffering on this planet.

Astronomers have discovered the existence of such a planet because this invisible planet exerts gravitational resistance on its orbiting star. Xavier Dumusque from the Geneva Observatory said the signal was "very weak, but real". He said: "This is an extraordinary discovery, which has pushed our technology to the limit." Alpha Centauri B and Alpha Centauri A are two stars very similar to the sun. The third of the three member stars that make up Alpha Centauri is relatively far away and has a low temperature.

From the scale of the universe, these stars are very, very close to the solar system, only a little more than 4 light years, compared with the diameter of our Milky Way galaxy of 65438+ million light years. However, despite this, with the rocket technology based on chemical fuel propulsion that we currently have, we will basically never get there.