Astronomers have identified 20 new stellar systems in our local solar neighbourhood, including the twenty-third and twenty-fourth closest stars to the Sun. When added to eight other systems announced by this team and six by other groups since 2000, the known population of the Milky Way galaxy within 33 light-years of Earth has grown by 16 percent in just the past six years. The discoveries were made by a group called the „Research Consortium on Nearby Stars“ (RECONS), which has been using small telescopes at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Chilean Andes since 1999. The new results will appear in the December 2006 issue of the Astronomical Journal.
https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noao0615/