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The light-year unit appeared a few years after the first successful measurement of the distance to a star other than the Sun, by Friedrich Bessel in 1838. The star was 61 Cygni , and he used a 160-millimetre (6.2 in) heliometre designed by Joseph von Fraunhofer .
Distance light travels in one day — Light-year: 63 241 — Distance light travels in one Julian year (365.25 days) — Oort cloud: 75 000: ± 25 000: Distance of the outer limit of Oort cloud from the Sun (estimated, corresponds to 1.2 light-years) — Parsec: 206 265 — One parsec. The parsec is defined in terms of the astronomical unit, is ...
The star, whose mass is roughly half that of the Sun, is currently 62 light-years from the Solar System. It was first noticed in 1999 using data from the Hipparcos satellite, and was estimated to pass less than 1.3 light-years (0.40 pc) from the Sun in 1.4 million years. [73]
Multiple other interstellar clouds exist in the region within 300 light-years of the Sun, known as the Local Bubble. [160] The latter feature is an hourglass-shaped cavity or superbubble in the interstellar medium roughly 300 light-years across. The bubble is suffused with high-temperature plasma, suggesting that it may be the product of ...
Evolution of the solar luminosity, radius and effective temperature compared to the present-day Sun. After Ribas (2009) [3] The uncrewed SOHO spacecraft was used to measure the radius of the Sun by timing transits of Mercury across the surface during 2003 and 2006. The result was a measured radius of 696,342 ± 65 kilometres (432,687 ± 40 miles).
The calculated stellar distance will be in the same measurement unit as used in Distance earth-sun (e.g. if Distance earth-sun = 1 au, unit for Distance star is in astronomical units; if Distance earth-sun = 1.5813 × 10 −5 ly, unit for Distance star is in light-years).
Prominent stars in the neighborhood of the Sun (center) This list of nearest bright stars is a table of stars found within 15 parsecs (48.9 light-years) of the nearest star, the Sun, that have an absolute magnitude of +8.5 or brighter, which is approximately comparable to a listing of stars more luminous than a red dwarf.
Barnard's Star is a small red dwarf star in the constellation of Ophiuchus.At a distance of 5.96 light-years (1.83 pc) from Earth, it is the fourth-nearest-known individual star to the Sun after the three components of the Alpha Centauri system, and is the closest star in the northern celestial hemisphere. [15]