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A light-year, alternatively spelled light year ( ly ), is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equal to exactly 9,460,730,472,580.8 km ( Scientific notation: 9.4607304725808 × 10 12 km), which is approximately 5.88 trillion mi. As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that ...
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. Distance measurement
Galactic year. The galactic year, also known as a cosmic year, is the duration of time required for the Sun to orbit once around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. [1] One galactic year is approximately 225 million Earth years. [2] The Solar System is traveling at an average speed of 230 km/s (828,000 km/h) or 143 mi/s (514,000 mph) within its ...
The parsec (symbol: pc) is a unit of length used to measure the large distances to astronomical objects outside the Solar System, approximately equal to 3.26 light-years or 206,265 astronomical units (AU), i.e. 30.9 trillion kilometres (19.2 trillion miles ). [a] The parsec unit is obtained by the use of parallax and trigonometry, and is ...
The red line is the path of a light beam emitted by the quasar about 13 billion years ago and reaching Earth at the present day. The orange line shows the present-day distance between the quasar and Earth, about 28 billion light-years, which is a larger distance than the age of the universe multiplied by the speed of light, ct.
GN-z11 is a high-redshift galaxy found in the constellation Ursa Major. It is among the farthest known galaxies from Earth ever discovered. [5] [6] The 2015 discovery was published in a 2016 paper headed by Pascal Oesch and Gabriel Brammer (Cosmic Dawn Center). Up until the discovery of JADES-GS-z13-0 in 2022 by the James Webb Space Telescope ...
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a D 25 isophotal diameter estimated at 26.8 ± 1.1 kiloparsecs (87,400 ± 3,600 light-years), but only about 1,000 light-years thick at the spiral arms (more at the bulge).
Andromeda has a D 25 isophotal diameter of about 46.56 kiloparsecs (152,000 light-years) and is approximately 765 kpc (2.5 million light-years) from Earth. The galaxy's name stems from the area of Earth's sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda , which itself is named after the princess who was the wife of Perseus in Greek ...