![]() ![]() This wonderful coincidence enables us to bring the light-year down to Earth. Robert Burnham noticed that, quite by coincidence, the number of astronomical units in one light-year and the number of inches in one mile are virtually the same.įor general reference, there are 63,000 astronomical units in one light-year, and 63,360 inches (160,000 cm) in one mile (1.6 km). Image via Brews Ohare/ Wikimedia Commons. A light beam takes 8 minutes to travel the 93 million miles (150 million km) from the sun to the Earth. One astronomical unit, or AU, equals about 93 million miles (150 million km).Īnother way of looking at it: the astronomical unit is a bit more than 8 light-minutes in distance. Keep reading, for a way to comprehend the vastness of the universe, using units of distance we know and use every day.īurnham started by relating the light-year to the astronomical unit – the Earth-sun distance. ![]() – author of Burnham’s Celestial Handbook – devised an ingenious way to portray the distance of light-years in terms of miles and kilometers. In the late 20th century astronomer Robert Burnham, Jr. Yet miles and kilometers are what most of us use to comprehend the distance from one place on Earth to another. And, if we try to express a star’s distance in miles or kilometers, we soon end up with impossibly huge numbers. And thus a light-year is 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion kilometers).īut stars and nebulae – not to mention distant galaxies – are vastly farther than one light-year away. Light is the fastest-moving stuff in our universe. So we speak of space objects in terms of light-years, the distance light travels in a year. They’re so far away that kilometers or miles aren’t a useful measure of their distance. Objects in our universe are extremely far away. Read more about this image at Wikimedia Commons. The large yellow shell depicts a light-year the smaller yellow shell depicts a light-month.
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