how fast or far is a lightyear?

Question

im not sure if a lightyear is a speed that is traveled in a year or an actual length of time?

Answer 1

A light year is a distance, not a speed. This is the distance a photon of light covers in a vacuum in one year.
The speed of light is 299 792 458 m/s, and there are 31 556 925 seconds in a year, so a light year is approximately 9.46E15 m.

Answer 2

This Site Might Help You.

RE:
how fast or far is a lightyear?
im not sure if a lightyear is a speed that is traveled in a year or an actual length of time?

Answer 3

Light year is a way of measuring distance. That doesn't make much sense because "light year" contains the word "year," which is normally a unit of time. Even so, light years measure distance.

You are used to measuring distances in either inches/feet/miles or centimeters/meters/kilometers, depending on where you live. You know how long a foot or a meter is -- you are comfortable with these units because you use them every day. Same thing with miles and kilometers -- these are nice, human increments of distance.

When astronomers use their telescopes to look at stars, things are different. The distances are gigantic. For example, the closest star to Earth (besides our sun) is something like 24,000,000,000,000 miles (38,000,000,000,000 kilometers) away. That's the closest star. There are stars that are billions of times farther away than that. When you start talking about those kinds of distances, a mile or kilometer just isn't a practical unit to use because the numbers get too big. No one wants to write or talk about numbers that have 20 digits in them!

So to measure really long distances, people use a unit called a light year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Therefore, a light second is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers). A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year, or:


186,000 miles/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year
A light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles (9,460,800,000,000 kilometers). That's a long way!

Cool Fact
A light nanosecond -- the distance light can travel in a billionth of a second -- is about 1 foot (about 30 cm). Radar uses this fact to measure how far away something like an airplane is. A radar antenna sends out a short radio pulse and then waits for it to echo off an airplane or other target. While it's waiting, it counts the number of nanoseconds that pass. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, so the number of nanoseconds divided by 2 tells the radar unit how far away the object is!

Answer 4

A lightyear is the distance light will travel in one year.

1 lightyear = 9.4605284 × 10^(15) meters

Answer 5

Well lets see..How many stars do you see ? How many do you claim are there ? Have you seen these other galaxies ? , stars ? , Universes ? How can you see faster then light ? And who says ALL of these things ? that's right " man "...... I see today pictures claiming to be from the hubble telescope all these so called Universes and stars and galaxies etc etc etc...and YET those exact SAME pictures I saw in astrology and science books when I was a kid many many many many years ago......the Hubble has only been in space since 1990.....strange how all these things existed even back then but was never nothing to see them much less take pictures of them back that far.... HG Wells had a radio show that spooked millions of people when they mistook the program for actual News....it was called War of the Worlds...it was fascinating how many millions of people went nuts over a simple radio broadcast and how many actually believed Aliens from another planet was killing people in all the cities.And even the people in the cities suppose to have been destroyed even believed It as happening and yet never seeing anything...... YOUR Question reminds me of that same thing..YOU claim allot of ideas and claims from so called scientist but have NO PROOF on your own of anything like that..... Now again the same pictures I see today they claim the hubble took out in space are the exact pictures I saw as a kid...growing up Long before one even traveled to space.....SO.....you can believe some man who claims anything to get a dollar for his program, or you can simply research the truth for yourself....and STOP believing everything you read or think is real cause a man called a scientist says it..DOES NOT make it so.......is your name gullible by any chance ?

Answer 6

1 lightyear = 9.4 * 10 to the power 12.
byeeeeeeeeee

Answer 7

It's a measure of distance. It's the distance travelled by light in one year. BTW, light travels 3 x 10^8 km/sec.

Answer 8

A light year is a unit to measure vast distances in space.
It is equal to 9.46 x 10 to the power 15 metres or 9.46 x 10 to the power 12 kilometres.

Answer 9

i think the speed of light is 300,000 metres per second, i know the speed of sound is 3,000 metres per second. the lightyear is calculated on the julian calendar year of 365.25 days or 31,557,600 seconds which is -
9, 460,730,472,580,800 metres. so a lightyear is 299,792,458 julian calendar years.

Answer 10

About 1400 times as far as Pluto is right now.