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Lightyear

Light-year
12lightyears.gif
Map showing the stars that lie within 12.5 light-years of the Sun
Unit information
Unit system astronomy units
Unit of length
Symbol ly 
Unit conversions
1 ly in ... ... is equal to ...
   metric (SI) units    9.4607×1015 m
   imperial & US units    5.8786×1012 mi
   astronomical units    63241 au
   0.3066 pc

The light-year is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances. It is about 9.5 trillion kilometres or 5.9 trillion miles. As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in vacuum in one Julian year (365.25 days). Because it includes the word "year", the term light-year is sometimes misinterpreted as a unit of time.

The light-year is most often used when expressing distances to stars and other distances on a galactic scale, especially in nonspecialist and popular science publications. The unit usually used in professional astrometry is the parsec (symbol: pc, about 3.26 light-years; the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends an angle of one second of arc).

As defined by the IAU, the light-year is the product of the Julian year (365.25 days as opposed to the 365.2425-day Gregorian year) and the speed of light (299792458 m/s). Both these values are included in the IAU (1976) System of Astronomical Constants, used since 1984. From this, the following conversions can be derived. The IAU recognized abbreviation for light-year is ly, although other standards like ISO 80000 uses "l.y." and localized symbols are frequent, such as "al" in French (from année-lumière) and Spanish (from año luz), "Lj" in German (from Lichtjahr), etc.


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Wikipedia

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