How long in earth time is a light year ?

Question

In terms of space- 1 light year ?

Answer 1

One Earth year.
A light year is the time it takes light to reach Earth from the Sun in our solar system. There are other suns out there, remember.

Speed of light is recognised as being 186,000 miles per second.

Answer 2

The same length of time as a normal Earth Year.

A light year is how far light will travel in one Earth year.

Light travels roughly 3x10^8 m/s and there are 60 * 60 * 24 * 365 = 3.1x10^7 seconds in a year (approximately).

So a light year is approximately 9.5x10^15 meters long (or 9,500,000,000,000 Km).

If you prefer miles, then light travels roughly 186,000 miles per second x 3.1x10^7 seconds in a year = 5.9x10^12 miles long approximately (or 5,900 Billion Miles).

Answer 3

A year

Answer 4

A light year is one earth year which is 365 1/4 days.

As this year is passing, you are running at the speed of light. Imagine this distance you have covered in this time.

So it really refers to a distance but it is done like this for more people to comprehend the vast distances in space. Everyone is posting vast numbers but they really mean nothing unless you have a system to picture the distance.

I always remember that light is slighty more than 186,00,000 miles a second. And do this speed for 1 year. That's enough for my brain.

Answer 5

One Year

Answer 6

I am confused...

Do you wish to know how long a light year is in time?

or

Do you wish to know how far in distance a Light Year is?

In time, a light year is one Earth Year long, or 365 Earth Days (24 hours each).

In distance, a Light Year is 186,000 miles per second
X 60 Seconds per minute X 60 Minutes per hour
X 24 Hours per day X 365 Days per year.

Answer 7

Answer:

A light-year is a unit of distance. It is the distance that light can travel in one year. Light moves at a velocity of about 300,000 kilometers (km) each second. So in one year, it can travel about 10 trillion km. More p recisely, one light-year is equal to 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers.

Why would you want such a big unit of distance? Well, on Earth, a kilometer may be just fine. It is a few hundred kilometers from New York City to Washington, DC; it is a few thousand kilometers from California to Maine. In the Universe, the kilometer is just too small to be useful. For example, the distance to the next nearest big galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is 21 quintillion km. That's 21,000,000,000,000,000,000 km. This is a number so large that it becomes hard to write and hard to interpret. So astronomers use other units of distance.

In our solar system, we tend to describe distances in terms of the Astronomical Unit (AU). The AU is defined as the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. It is approximately 150 million km (93 million miles). Mercury can be said to be about 1/3 of an AU from the Sun and Pluto averages about 40 AU from the Sun. The AU, however, is not big enough of a unit when we start talking about distances to objects outside our solar system.

For distances to other parts of the Milky Way Galaxy (or even further), astronomers use units of the light-year or the parsec . The light-year we have already defined. The parsec is equal to 3.3 light-years. Using the light-year, we can say that :

The Crab supernova remnant is about 4,000 light-years away.

The Milky Way Galaxy is about 150,000 light-years across.

The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.3 million light-years away.

I found out the above information from the website that follows:

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question19.html

I hope that this answers your question?

Answer 8

It is exactly 1 year. Really, it's how far light travels in a vacuum over the course of 1 Earth year, hence light-year. It is 5,869,713,600,000 miles !

Answer 9

A light year is the distance light will travel in one year, which is:

1 light year = 9.4605284 × 10 to the power 15 metres, which is...

9460528400000000 metres or 9460528400000 km

= about 5912830250000 miles

Answer 10

a light year is a year long. I believe what you want to know is what distance is spanned in a light year. If light travels at 299,792.458 km/s is the speed of light in vacuum. simply multiply that by 60 for each second in a minute and then multiply that by 60 for each minute in an hour and then multiply that by 24 for the number of hours in a day and then multiply that by 365 (or 365.250) and you have your answer. 9454254955488 Kilometers.