Starting in our cosmic neighborhood, the closest star-forming region to us, the Orion Nebula, is a short 7,861,000,000,000,000 miles away, or more simply, 1,300 light-years away. Measuring in miles or kilometers at an astronomical scale would be extremely cumbersome and impractical. At first glance, this may seem like an extreme distance, but the enormous scale of the universe dwarfs this length. To find the distance of a light-year, you multiply this speed by the number of hours in a year (8,766). Unlike the speed of your car when running errands, the speed of light is constant throughout the universe and is known to high precision. For example, the nearest star to our sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. In the same way that you may measure the distance to the grocery store in the time it takes to drive there ("The grocery store is a 15-minute drive away"), astronomers measure the distances of stars in the time it takes for light to travel to us. On the scale of the universe, measuring distances in miles or kilometers doesn't cut it. A light-year is the distance a beam of light travels in a single Earth year, or 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers). About 3.262 light-years equal one parsec.ī) A light-year is a measurement of distance and not time (as the name might suggest). A light-year, alternatively spelled lightyear, is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (9.46 × miles), or 63,241 astronomical units.
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