Mike wrote:

approximately 40 light years away? And ftm, is there a ranking of all stars
by their distance~?

There are a great many stars within forty light-years, but we don't
know exactly how many because the faintest ones are very hard to
detect at any interstellar distance. For example, in the list of the
hundred nearest stars at

http://www.chara.gsu.edu/RECONS/TOP100.htm

a couple of recent additions, red dwarfs with about a tenth of the
Sun's mass and a ten-thousandth or less the luminosity, are as nearby
as twelve light-years or so. Even if we assume that we've now found
everything within that distance, and that our immediate environs are
typical of the 'neighbourhood', based on the above table we could
expect there to be some 19*37 or seven hundred star-systems,
comprising 33*37 or twelve hundred individual stars, within 40 LY.
(37 is about 40/12 cubed.)

Here's a list of the 150 nearest star-systems in the Hipparcos catalogue:

http://astro.estec.esa.nl/Hipparcos/table361.html.

You can also query the Hipparcos catalogue by parallax in order to
get lists of stars within a certain distance range, but you'd have to
sort them yourself, whether by hand or by loading them into a
database. Here's the "multi-parameter search" page:

http://astro.estec.esa.nl/hipparcos_scripts/hipMultiSearch.pl.

For example when I asked for the entries between 35 and 45 LY
(parallax of 72.4 - 93.1 mas) I got a list of 177 star-systems.
Narrowing the range down to 39.5 - 40.5 LY (80.5 - 82.5 mas) I still
got ten results, the brightest of which being the third-magnitude
"proper motion star" Beta Trianguli Australis at 40.1 +/- .3 LY.

--
Odysseus