Question: What is a light-year and how is it used? Answer: A light-year is a unit of distance.

It is the distance that light can travel in one year. Light moves at a velocity of about 300,000 kilometers (km) each second. So in one year, it can travel about 10 trillion km. More precisely, one lightyear is equal to 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers. Why would you want such a big unit of distance? Well, on Earth, a kilometer may be just fine. It is a few hundred kilometers from New York City to Washington, DC; it is a few thousand kilometers from California to Maine. In the universe, the kilometer is just too small to be useful. For example, the distance to the next nearest big galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is 21 quintillion km. That's 21,000,000,000,000,000,000 km. This is a number so large that it becomes hard to write and hard to interpret. So astronomers use other units of distance. In our solar system, we tend to describe distances in terms of the Astronomical Unit (AU). The AU is defined as the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. It is approximately 150 million km (93 million miles). Mercury can be said to be about 1/3 of an AU from the Sun and Pluto averages about 40 AU from the Sun. The AU, however, is not big enough of a unit when we start talking about distances to objects outside our solar system. For distances to other parts of the Milky Way Galaxy (or even further), astronomers use units of the light-year or the parsec . The light-year we have already defined. The parsec is equal to 3.3 light-years. Using the light-year, we can say that :

The Crab supernova remnant is about 4,000 light-years away. The Milky Way Galaxy is about 150,000 light-years across. The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.3 million light-years away.

What is a light year?

A light year is a way of measuring distance. That doesn't make much sense because "light year" contains the word "year," which is normally a unit of time. Even so, light years measure distance. You are used to measuring distances in either inches/feet/miles or centimeters/meters/kilometers, depending on where you live. You know how long a foot or a meter is -- you are comfortable with these units because you use them every day. Same thing with miles and kilometers -- these are nice, human increments of distance. When astronomers use their telescopes to look at stars, things are different. The distances are gigantic. For example, the closest star to Earth (besides our sun) is something like 24,000,000,000,000 miles (38,000,000,000,000 kilometers) away. That's the closest star. There are stars that are billions of times farther away than that. When you start talking about those kinds of distances, a mile or kilometer just isn't a practical unit to use because the numbers get too big. No one wants to write or talk about numbers that have 20 digits in them! So to measure really long distances, people use a unit called a light year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Therefore, a light second is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers). A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year, or: 186,000 miles/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year A light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles (9,460,800,000,000 kilometers). That's a long way! Using a light year as a distance measurement has another advantage -- it helps you determine age. Let's say that a star is 1 million light years away. The light from that star has traveled at the speed of light to reach us. Therefore, it has taken the star's light 1 million years to get here, and the light we are seeing was created 1 million years ago. So the star we are seeing is really how the star looked a million years ago, not how it looks today. In the same way, our sun is 8 or so light minutes away. If the sun were to suddenly explode right now, we wouldn't know about it for eight minutes because that is how long it would take for the light of the explosion to get here.

Question

What is a light-year and how long is 1 light-year?

Answer

A light-year is defined as the distance that light can travel in 1 year. We can calculate this by multiplying the speed of light by 1 year (or 3.1557*10^7 seconds) to find the distance: d = c*t =(2.9979*10^8 m/s)*(3.1557*10^7 s) =9.4605*10^15 meters or ~9,500,000,000,000 kilometers or ~5,900,000,000,000 miles or ~63,279 au (ad nauseum) See also http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae498.cfm Answered by: Gregory Ogin, Physics Undergraduate Student, UST, St. Paul, MN This is a great question! I especially like the way in which you asked it. The word long can be used to mean both distance between two points in space as well as two points in time. When you ask such a question in relation to a light year both meanings are important! A light year is the distance between two points in space that it would take light to travel when the distance between the two points in time are one year. So, lets see (pun!) what this would be. Light travels at 186,000 miles every second! That is a huge number! If you were to write one number per second for eight hours a day without stopping to eat or to rest your hand it would take you six and a half days to get to number 186,000! And to think light travels that many miles in only one second! Another way to think about how large this number is, is to think about how many times you could go back and fourth across the United States. If you go back and fourth across the US 66 times you will have traveled 186,000 miles. If you did this going an average speed of 60 miles per hour you will need one year and three weeks! But light can do this same thing in one second! In one year there are 365 days of 24 hours. Each hour has 60 minutes and each minute is 60 seconds long. So, 60s/min x 60min/hr x 24hr/day x 365days equals 31,536,000s. This many seconds is an even larger number than the number of miles light goes in one second! It would take you three years to get to number 31,536,000 if you could write one number per second for eight hours per day. This many miles means you could go back and forth across the United States over one thousand times! At 60 miles per hour it would take you 60 years! So, we take these two very large numbers and multiply them together to see how many miles light can travel in one year. You can tell already that this is going to be huge! That number is 5,865,696,000,000. Working eight hours per day at a rate of one number per second it would take you two hundred thousand years to get to number 5,865,696,000,000! This gets you across the United States two billion times which at our average speed of 60 miles per hour, would take nine trillion years! Now that you know what the distance is that light travels in one year you can also know the distance between objects in the universe. The closest star to us is about four light years away. This means that it is 23,462,784,000,000 miles away. How about this: the edge of the universe is about 15 billion light years away from us! Can you even imagine how many miles away that is?

What is a light year A light year is measure of distance similar to a mile or a kilometer. A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year. One light year is equal to 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers
So how far is that?

Light can travel around the earth 7 times in one second. That distance would be a light second since that is how far light can travel in a second. Since there are 60 seconds in a minute you multiply that distance by 60 and you have a light minute. That means light can circle the earth 420 times in one minute! Multiply by 60 to get a light hour. Multiply by 24 to get a light day (how far light can travel in a day). Multiply that by 365 and you get alight year which is the distance light can travel in a year. The moon which is about 1.25 light seconds away from the earth. That is about the same distance as going 9 times around the earth. If you turned on a bright light on the moon it would take 1.25 seconds to reach the earth. The distance light can travel in 60 seconds is a light minute. It takes light 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the earth, so the sun is 8 light minutes away. Another term for the distance from the earth to the sun is an Astronomical Unit (AU). That distance is like traveling around the earth 3360 times (7x60x8). It takes light from the sun 340 minutes (5.7 hours) to travel from the sun to Pluto. That is equivalent to 39.5 AU. While that is only 5.7 light hours, if you travel at 100 km/hr it would take 60,000,000 hrs, which is 6849.3 years to reach pluto! So now imagine how far light can travel in a year! At 100 km/hr it would take you 10,526,292 years to travel one light year!

Some Distances in Light Years

The star that is nearest to our sun is Proxima Centauri which is 4.2 light years away. There are only eleven stars that are less then 10 light years away. There are only eleven stars that are less then 10 light years away. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 100,000 light years across The closest galaxy to the Milky Way, Andromeda, is 2,500,000 light years away. The most distant galaxy discovered is 12,800,000,000 light years away. Who knows what is beyond that?

Astronomy Basics: What is a light year? Have you ever heard someone say something is astronomical? If you want to say something is big, you can say astronomical because things in space are so big. The Sun is 93 million miles away that is a big number. Big numbers are hard to use. What if we said the Sun was 520,800 million feet away? Is that correct? Yes it is, but if we use feet instead of miles the number is much bigger and it is even harder to use. It is much easier for scientists to do math with small numbers like 93 million rather than large numbers like 520,800 million. When we start to talk about stars the numbers get, well, astronomical. The nearest star is about 24 trillion miles away. That is 24,000,000,000,000 miles. If a scientist wanted to do a math problem with that huge number it would be very difficult. To make this number smaller we use something called light years. Just like using miles instead of feet makes the number above smaller, using light years instead of miles makes numbers smaller. A light year means 6 trillion miles (6,000,000,000,000). Can you remember that? A light year means 6 trillion miles. Why do we call it a light year? In one year light can travel 6 trillion miles. Think about that for a moment. If you go outside tonight and shine a flash light at the sky, in the next one year that light will travel 6 trillion miles.

Assignment # 2. Answer the following questions: If the nearest star is 4 light years away how many miles away is it? How long will it take for the light from that star to travel to the Earth?