New! Sign up for our free email newsletter.
Reference Terms
from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Light-year

A light-year or lightyear (symbol: ly) is a unit of measurement of length, specifically the distance light travels in a vacuum in one year. While there is no authoritative decision on which year is used, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) recommends the Julian year. A light-year is equal to 9,460,730,472,580.8 km (about 9.461 Pm; 5,878,625,373,183.61 statute miles; about 63,240 astronomical units or about 0.3066 parsecs. The exact length of the light-year depends on the length of the reference year used in the calculation, and there is no wide consensus on the reference to be used. The figures above are based on a reference year of exactly 365.25 days (each of exactly 86,400 SI seconds). A few examples of distances for light to travel are: Reflected sunlight from the Moon's surface takes 1.3 seconds to travel the 4.04 × 10-8 light years to Earth. It takes 8.3 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth (a distance of 1.58 × 10-5 light-years). The most distant space probe, Voyager 1, was 13 light hours (only 1.5 × 10-3 light years) away from Earth in September 2004. It took Voyager 27 years to cover that distance. The nearest known star (other than the Sun), Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away. The center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 26,000 light years away.

Related Stories
 


Space & Time News

April 8, 2026

Planetary exploration may be about to get a major speed boost. Researchers tested a semi-autonomous robot that can move from rock to rock, analyzing each without waiting for human instructions. The system completed missions up to three times faster ...
A new concept suggests SpaceX’s Starship could revolutionize a future mission to Uranus, one of the solar system’s most overlooked planets. By refueling in orbit and helping slow the spacecraft on arrival, it could cut travel time nearly in ...
A mysterious spike of platinum buried deep in Greenland’s ice has long fueled theories of a catastrophic comet or asteroid strike 12,800 years ago—possibly triggering a sudden return to icy conditions known as the Younger Dryas. But new research ...
Mars didn’t always look like the barren world we see today. Over billions of years, the Sun’s solar wind stripped away much of its atmosphere, helping transform it from a warmer, wetter planet ...
Scientists have proposed a surprising connection between solar flares and earthquakes. When solar activity disturbs the ionosphere, it may generate electric fields that penetrate fragile fracture zones in Earth’s crust. If a fault is already ...
NASA’s Perseverance rover has just made history by driving across Mars using routes planned by artificial intelligence instead of human operators. A vision-capable AI analyzed the same images and terrain data normally used by rover planners, ...
Hidden lava tunnels on the Moon and Mars could one day shelter human explorers, offering natural protection from radiation and space debris. A European research team has unveiled a bold new mission concept that uses three different robots working ...
Low-Earth orbit is more crowded—and fragile—than it looks. Satellites constantly weave past each other, burning fuel and making dozens of evasive maneuvers every year just to stay safe. A major solar storm could disable navigation and ...
Physicists have unveiled a new way to simulate a mysterious form of dark matter that can collide with itself but not with normal matter. This self-interacting dark matter may trigger a dramatic collapse inside dark matter halos, heating and ...
When scientists sent bacteria-infecting viruses to the International Space Station, the microbes did not behave the same way they do on Earth. In microgravity, infections still occurred, but both viruses and bacteria evolved differently over time. ...
A team of physicists has discovered a surprisingly simple way to build nuclear clocks using tiny amounts of rare thorium. By electroplating thorium onto steel, they achieved the same results as years of work with delicate crystals — but far more ...
Nearly everything in the universe is made of mysterious dark matter and dark energy, yet we can’t see either of them directly. Scientists are developing detectors so sensitive they can spot particle interactions that might occur once in years or ...

Latest Headlines

updated 12:56 pm ET