Light Years
Day 1,950, 01:39
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Published in Australia 
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by
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by Jakesweet27
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 light-year is equal to 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers.
Why would you want such a big unit of distance you all obliviously ask? 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.
On a side note i think there should be an new category for articles, it's kind of downgrading putting science material in the social interactions and entertainment category.
Smarter every single article with Jake.
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 light-year is equal to 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers.
Why would you want such a big unit of distance you all obliviously ask? 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.
On a side note i think there should be an new category for articles, it's kind of downgrading putting science material in the social interactions and entertainment category.
Smarter every single article with Jake.
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Comments
I dunno I find it rather entertaining to ignore the article. 😛
Keep up the entertainment bud 😃
I think I'm getting smarter but I don't know what I'll use the smarts for.
Nice work Jake
Pity you never said how a parsec (or parallax arcsecond as some of us are fond of calling it) is defined.
Whether special units like AUs, light years and parsecs even need to exist when we have all those nice SI prefixes is another matter.