I want to learn the distance of light years etc ..how can I learn it easy?

Question

I was talking to someone who read a book and remembered the distance ..or measurement of stars etc .
I want to learn it so when people ask me i have an idea of it all .
it was neat .. light travels at ..such and such speed ..or .. if it is this far away it takes the light this amount of time to reach us.

any websotes or lessons someone knows or from your own experiences?

Answer 1

There's a bit of ambiguity in your question. Are you wanting to learn the correct teminology, or are you looking for a way to put it all into perspective.

A light-year is simply the distance light travels in one year in vacuum. The speed of light is 2.998E+8 m/s (299,800,000 meters/sec,) which makes a light-year worth about 9.461E+12 kilometers (5.913E+12 miles . . . that's nearly six trillion miles.)

To properly put this in perspective, the distance between the Earth and the Sun is 93 million miles. If you had a scale model where you were standing where the Sun would be, and the Earth was a mere ten feet away from you, the marker for a light-year would be over 120 miles away. The nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. On our scale model, Proxima Centauri would be over 505 miles distant. A flight from New York to Cleveland, Ohio would fit inside this distance with 100 miles to spare.

Answer 2

Light travels at a rate of 186,000 per second. In one calendar year a beam of light will travel 6 trillion miles. Multiply that by the number of light years quoted in a source and you have a prodigious distance.

Answer 3

Read anything and everything that interests you.

The way to learn anything is to learn how to learn (if you get me). Reading a lot teaches your brain how to learn, how to organize information, and how to retrieve it when you want it. Being able to answer a question or make a comment in a conversation means being able to find the information you have stored, and that skill has nothing to do with the topic. It has to do with mental discipline.
Plus a LOVE of learning for its own sake.

Try not to limit your reading to a single area of interest, if you like space sciences you probably will find paleontology (fossils) and plate tectonics (volcanos and earthquakes) equally fascinating.
The more breadth to your reading and your experiences, the more your brain learns how to handle it all.

Astronomy magazine is a good magazine (or check their website astronomy.com) for well-written and informative articles on all kinds of space topics. Also Discover magazine, and National Geographic.

Answer 4

The speed of light is approximately 186,282.397 miles per second in a vacuum. A light year is the distance that light travels in one year or approximately 5,878,625,373,183.61 miles, assuming 365.25 days per year.

Astronomers tend to use the parsec as the measurement of distance. A parsec is approximately 3.26 light years.

Answer 5

Light travels at 186,000 Miles per second.

So how many seconds are there in a year?

Answer:

60 X 60 X 24 X 365 = 31536,000 seconds per year

Then:

186,000 miles per sec times 31,536,000 sec per year =

5,865,696,000,000 miles in one light year.

Answer 6

like the first guy said; the approx speed of light is 186,282 miles per second
186,282 x 60= 11,176,920 miles per minute
11,176,920 x 60 = 670,615,200 miles per hour
670,615,200 x 24= 16,094,764,800 miles per day
16,094,764,800 x 365.25 = 5,878,612,843,000 miles per yr.
or apprx 5.9 trillion miles, that is a light year!.

Answer 7

Light travels at approximately 300'000KM per second! so you multiply that by the number of seconds there are in a year and you get the total amount of KM traveled in one year by light (one light year)
There are 31'536'000 seconds in one year... so you multiply that by 300'000 and you get your answer...
31'536'000 * 300'000 = 9'460'800'000'000 KM!!!!!

Answer 8

research...books,internet, ect...