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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, 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]
This number is likely much higher, due to the sheer number of stars needed to be surveyed; a star approaching the Solar System 10 million years ago, moving at a typical Sun-relative 20–200 kilometers per second, would be 600–6,000 light-years from the Sun at present day, with millions of stars closer to the Sun.
Distance light travels in one second — Lunar distance: 0.0026 — Average distance from Earth (which the Apollo missions took about 3 days to travel) — Solar radius: 0.005 — Radius of the Sun (695 500 km, 432 450 mi, a hundred times the radius of Earth or ten times the average radius of Jupiter) — Light-minute: 0.12 — Distance light ...
Based on this size of the stars, astronomers determined Betelgeuse sits just 530 light-years from Earth — about 25% closer than expected. ... However, even at 530 light-years distance, our ...
The distance of Alpha Centauri from the Earth is now reckoned at 4.396 light-years or 4.159 × 10 13 km.) α Centauri A (left) is of the same stellar type G2 as the Sun, while α Centauri B (right) is a K1-type star. [67] Later, John Herschel made the first micrometrical observations in 1834. [68]
This is a list of known galaxies within 3.8 megaparsecs (12.4 million light-years) of the Solar System, in ascending order of heliocentric distance, or the distance to the Sun. This encompasses about 50 major Local Group galaxies, and some that are members of neighboring galaxy groups , the M81 Group and the Centaurus A/M83 Group , and some ...
Light in a vacuum travels around 300,000 kilometres (186,000 mi) per second, so 1 light-year is about 9.461 × 10 12 kilometers (5.879 trillion miles) or 63,241 AU. Hence, Proxima Centauri is approximately 4.243 light-years from Earth.