What is the light year?

The unit of light years is often used when referring to the distance in the universe as the distance from the Earth to the Sun, Moon, Mars or the distance between planets . So, the light year is what? How many kilometers is a light year?

Light moves at 300,000 km / s and is the fastest moving thing in the universe. To make it easy to imagine, you can imagine that if the plane reaches the speed of light, it only takes 1 second to move around the Earth equator up to 7.5 times.

The light year is the distance the light can travel for a year. And a light year is equal to 9,460,528,400,000 km (9.5 trillion km), ie 5,878,499,810,000 miles.

If you walk at an average speed of 20 minutes a mile, then you have to spend 225 million years (not eating or sleeping) to be able to go through a light-year.

This number is terrible. And for us to easily visualize the distance of a light-year, astronomer Robert Burnham compressed the light-year unit into an astronomical unit - the distance between Earth and the Sun, about 150 million kilometers, equivalent to 8 light minutes. That is, a light year has 63 thousand astronomical units.

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