How long is a light year?
Light-years are a more convenient way to express light-time distance and it helps astronomers compare the distances between objects that are very far apart.
Have you ever looked at the stars and wondered how far away they are? Even though we can see them in the sky, they’re actually pretty far away. The distance is so big that it’s hard to measure in miles or kilometers, which is where a thing called a “light-year” comes into play.
To understand a light-year you have to know about light. Light is electromagnetic radiation that travels at a speed of 299,792,458 meters per second, about 186,282 miles per second, which is the fastest speed that anything can travel in the universe.
A simplified definition of a light-year is the distance that light travels in one year, about 5.88 trillion miles. To give you an idea of how far away a light-year is, if you could travel at the speed of a light-year, it would take four years to reach the closest star to our solar system: Proxima Centauri.
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