Light Year (Noun)
Meaning
The distance that light travels in a vacuum in 1 year; 5.88 trillion miles or 9.46 trillion kilometers.
Classification
Nouns denoting quantities and units of measure.
Examples
- The nearest star to Earth, aside from the Sun, is about 4.24 light-years away in the constellation of the Southern Cross.
- The most distant human-made object, Voyager 1, has traveled over 14 light-years from Earth.
- A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, which is roughly 6 trillion miles.
- The speed of Voyager 1 is approximately 0.006% of the speed of light, so it would take it around 70,000 years to travel just 1 light-year.
- Light-years are used to measure the enormous distances between stars and galaxies in our universe because they help put the immense scale of space into perspective.