Our closest stars and exoplanets mapped

Non smoking gun

Honorable
The 10 parsec sample in the Gaia era
A COSMIC census of the currently known objects in the vicinity of our sun has revealed that there are 540 stars and planets in the immediate neighborhood.
Using existing databases of objects alongside data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, which is mapping billions of stars in our galaxy, Céline Reylé at the UTINAM Institute in France and her colleagues pooled all knowledge
of objects within 10 parsecs, or 33 light years, of our sun.
That number is made up of 375 stars, 88 brown dwarfs and 77 exoplanets.
Of the stars in the census, 249 are small red dwarfs like Proxima Centauri, our closest neighbour at 4.2 light years away. The stellar count also includes 21 white dwarfs (dense remnants of dead stars), 18 G-type stars like our sun and
two systems with five stars each
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
NASA says the James Webb observatory is supposed to launch by Halloween this year. Heard somewhere it can resolve lights on the dark side of exoplanets. Don't know if that's true or not but if so there could be some real jaw droppers headed our way.
 

Non smoking gun

Honorable
Intuitively I'd say as only 18 of the 375 stars are G-type like ours, perhaps these are the best for producing life?
Also, will the dimmer 249 small red dwarfs tend to produce life used to lower light levels, with the classic large 'alien' eyes?

The JWT was very ambitious for its time. Development began in 1996 for a launch in 2007 with a 500 million budget. Now the launch is October 31 (budget $10bn).

Additional to the astronomical fourteen year delay, another unusual aspect is that whilst the current directors of the Hubble and other major space telescopes, such as NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory, do not have security clearances, the JWST director will be required to have access to Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmented Information—the highest level of classified information, derived from intelligence sources and methods.
 
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