"nearby stars" works well.

But, for each of your tries so far, go to the "giv us your feedback" box at the bottom of WolframAlpha and indicate that you expected the query to parse properly. The parser in Wolfram Alpha is an evolving thing and the WolframAlpha team adds new linguistic interpretation syntaxes partially based on user feedback.

And, by the way, your query should be in their linguistics since a related query might be something more detailed like

"stars between 30 and 50 ly from us"