The moon is the closest star to the earth. It is over 380，000 kilometres from us.

　　It takes 100 days for us to get there by train or 16 days by airplane. The sun is much farther¹ away.

　　It is 150 million kilometres from us-400 times farther than the moon. It would take us more than a hundred years to reach the sun by train or over a dozen² years by plane. As for the fixed³ stars， they are even farther away.

　　They are hundreds of thousands or even several million times farther from the earth than the sun. Light and electric wave travel at300 thousand kilometres per⁴ second. If someone was to call us from theit would take the electric waves sun， 1more than eight minutes to reach us. But if someone was to call us from Altair， we wouldn't receive the call until 16 years later. Now you can see how far we are from the stars.