How Far Away and How Big Are Stars?

“How far away are the stars from earth? How big are the stars?”

Great questions, Hadassah! The short answer to both questions is: It varies.

Star Distance

Some stars, like Proxima Centauri, are extremely close in a relative sense, being just over four light-years away from earth. A light-year is the distance that light can travel in a given direction in a year. So far, we have discovered approximately 150 stars or other luminous objects within 20 light-years of earth.1 We know one star, called Earendel, is approximately 28 billion light-years away.2 That’s a really long way away!

Proxima Centauri.
ESA/Hubble, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Star Size

Like their distance, the size of stars varies widely. The smallest known star, about the size of Saturn, is located 600 light-years away. It has the name EBLM J0555-57Ab.3 Interestingly, Proxima Centauri, the star closest to earth, is also one of the smallest stars, ranking third on the list!4

TRAPPIST-1, the second smallest star on the list, is slightly bigger than Jupiter.
ESO/O. Furtak, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

How Could Light from Stars Reach Earth?

Now you may be thinking, how could light from stars so far away reach earth if earth is 28 billion light-years away? That’s a great question. It turns out that because light-years represent distance, not time, there are a couple of possible ways for light to get here. First, because we cannot measure the one-way speed of light, it could be instantaneous toward us. That would allow the light from every star to reach earth immediately, no matter how far away it is. Alternatively, God may have miraculously allowed the light to reach earth, although the text does not say so specifically.

The stars are mentioned almost as an afterthought in Genesis 1. God does not spend much time on them. He is much more interested in earth and the pinnacle of his creation, man.

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Footnotes

1. Sol Station, “Stars Within 20 Light-Years,” accessed February 2026, https://chview.nova.org/solcom/stars/s20ly.htm.
2. EarthSky Voices, “The Colors of Earendel, Farthest Known Star,” EarthSky, August 17, 2023, https://earthsky.org/space/the-colors-of-earendel-companion-most-distant-star/.
3. Admin, “Day 38 – The Smallest Known Stars,” Explore the Cosmos, March 6, 2025, https://explorethecosmos.org/day-38-the-smallest-known-stars/.
4. Admin, “Smallest Known Stars.”