Nearby stars: measured parallax, derived distance

Measured facts

Proxima Centauri

1.302 pc · 4.246 lyMeasured Gaia parallax 768.0665 mas.

Barnard's Star

1.828 pc · 5.963 lyMeasured Gaia parallax 546.9759 mas.

Wolf 359

2.409 pc · 7.856 lyMeasured Gaia parallax 415.1794 mas.

Ross 128

3.375 pc · 11.007 lyMeasured Gaia parallax 296.3053 mas.

The volume these stars live in

COSMOS builds its stellar field from a reproducible Gaia archive query: every source with parallax at least 10 mas, parallax signal-to-noise at least 10 and a non-null G magnitude inside 100 pc. The result is 371,766 measured sources in 100 checksum-verified chunks, with 371,766 carrying proper motion and 169,709 carrying a published radial velocity.

Distances are reciprocal parallaxes in parsecs with no zero-point correction, which is the same convention the renderer uses for every source in the volume — named or not.

Named versus unnamed

Naming is a convenience for search and narration, not a scientific distinction. Eight other measured sources in the catalogue lie closer than the most distant named landmark, and further ones are plentiful; COSMOS does not present the named set as a ranking of the nearest stars.

What the renderer draws

• Each source is a measured point with bounded brightness and colour transfer; no stellar disc is drawn.
• Positions propagate linearly from the Gaia J2016.0 reference epoch using proper motion and radial velocity where published.
• Where Gaia publishes no radial velocity, the radial component remains unknown rather than being set to zero.
• An optional AllWISE infrared sky overlay sits behind the stars as observational context with no positional parallax.