Even 'nearby' stars are very far away.

Beyond our own Sun, the next nearest stars are incredibly far away. Even at the speed of light, it would take about 5 years to reach the nearest star. (Today's fastest spacecraft would take about 100,000 years.)

The distance to the stars is so great that we need a new measure of distance: the light-year, the distance that light travels in one year -- about 6 trillion miles. In the image above, a new generation of stars is being born from enormous clouds of dust and gas, some 5000 light-years from Earth. Can you make out the stars in this picture?

Top: Young stars forming in the Lagoon Nebula, in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. Left: The Keyhole Nebula, near the Orion Nebula, about 1,500 light-years from Earth. New stars form when these huge amounts of matter collapse under their own gravity. The dust and gas in this image is illuminated by the light from a star nearby.

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