WHAT IS A LIGHT-YEAR?

Prepared by: Lyngel James A. Lape

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 LIGHT-YEAR?
o use to describe their distance
o the distance light travels in one
Earth year
o One light-year is about 6 trillion
miles (9 trillion km) i.e. 6 with 12
zeros behind it.

An image of distant galaxies captured by the NASA/ESA

Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA,
RELICS; Acknowledgment: D. Coe et al.
 LIGHT-YEAR?
Astronomy

 A unit of astronomical
distance equivalent to the
distance that light travels in
one year, which is 9.4607 ×
10¹² km (nearly 6 million
An image of distant galaxies captured by the NASA/ESA million miles).
Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA,
RELICS; Acknowledgment: D. Coe et al.
 LIGHT-YEAR?
 Light travels at a speed of
186,000 miles (or 300,000
km) per second.
 The farther an object is, the

A light beam needs only 8 minutes to travel the 93 million farther in the past we see it.
miles (150 million kilometers) from the sun to the Earth.
Image via Brews OHare on Wikimedia Commons.
LIGHT-YEAR?

 Our Sun is the closest star to us. It is

about 93 million miles away. So, the Sun's
light takes about 8.3 minutes to reach us.
LIGHT-YEAR?
 The next closest star to us is about
4.3 light-years away.
 So, when we see this star today,
we’re actually seeing it as it was 4.3
years ago.
 Galaxy
 Stars are found in large groups called
galaxies.
 A galaxy can have millions or billions of
stars.
 The universe is filled with billions of
galaxies. Some of these galaxies are much
farther away.
 Andromeda
 the nearest large galaxy to
us
 2.5 million light-years
away

An image of the Andromeda galaxy, as seen by

NASA's GALEX observatory. Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech
 Galaxy
 In 2016 NASA's Hubble Space Telescope
looked at the farthest galaxy ever seen.
 This very young galaxy is called GN-z11.
 It is 13.4 billion light-years away, so
today we can see it as it was 13.4 billion
years ago.
  The oldest one found so far in
GN-z11 (shown in the close up
image).
The image is a bit blurry because
this galaxy is so far away.
This picture shows hundreds of very old and distant
galaxies. Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (Yale University),
G. Brammer (STScI), P. van Dokkum (Yale University),
and G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz)
 References:

 https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/light-
year/en/
 https://www.lexico.com/definition/light
_year
 https://earthsky.org/space/what-is-a-
light-year