Tau

Its story

Tau Ceti is one of the closest Sun-like stars known, and the sixth-nearest naked-eye neighbour of our own — just 11.9 light years away. Twentieth-century astronomers chose it as a target for the first radio search for extraterrestrial civilisations, Project OZMA, in 1960. It is wrapped in a disc of dust and debris, and several planetary candidates have been proposed around it, making it one of the most closely watched solar analogues in the sky.