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A light-year, alternatively spelled light year (ly or lyr[3]), is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equal to exactly 9,460,730,472,580.8 km (Scientific notation: 9.4607304725808 × 10 12 km), which is approximately 5.88 trillion mi.
A light-year is the distance light travels in one Julian year, around 9461 billion kilometres, 5879 billion miles, or 0.3066 parsecs. In round figures, a light year is nearly 10 trillion kilometres or nearly 6 trillion miles. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth after the Sun, is around 4.2 light-years away. [89]
The Hubble length or Hubble distance is a unit of distance in cosmology, defined as cH −1 — the speed of light multiplied by the Hubble time. It is equivalent to 4,420 million parsecs or 14.4 billion light years. (The numerical value of the Hubble length in light years is, by definition, equal to that of the Hubble time in years.)
In physical cosmology, the age of the universe is the time elapsed since the Big Bang.Astronomers have derived two different measurements of the age of the universe: [1] a measurement based on direct observations of an early state of the universe, which indicate an age of 13.787 ± 0.020 billion years as interpreted with the Lambda-CDM concordance model as of 2021; [2] and a measurement based ...
3.261 56 ly. The parsec (symbol: pc) is a unit of length used to measure the large distances to astronomical objects outside the Solar System, approximately equal to 3.26 light-years or 206,265 astronomical units (AU), i.e. 30.9 trillion kilometres (19.2 trillion miles). [a] The parsec unit is obtained by the use of parallax and trigonometry ...
This distance is the time that it took light to reach the observer from the object multiplied by the speed of light. For instance, the radius of the observable universe in this distance measure becomes the age of the universe multiplied by the speed of light (1 light year/year), which turns out to be approximately 13.8 billion light years.
Magnitude (astronomy) In astronomy, magnitude is a measure of the brightness of an object, usually in a defined passband. An imprecise but systematic determination of the magnitude of objects was introduced in ancient times by Hipparchus. Magnitude values do not have a unit. The scale is logarithmic and defined such that a magnitude 1 star is ...
Definition of the Lorentz factor γ. The Lorentz factor or Lorentz term (also known as the gamma factor[1]) is a quantity expressing how much the measurements of time, length, and other physical properties change for an object while it moves. The expression appears in several equations in special relativity, and it arises in derivations of the ...