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1 kilometer [km] = 1.0570008340247E-13 light year [St. G.]

Initial value

Converted value

meter exameter petameter terameter gigameter megameter kilometer hectometer decameter decimeter centimeter millimeter micrometer micron nanometer picometer femtometer attometer megaparsec kiloparsec parsec light year astronomical unit league naval league (UK) maritime league (international) league (statutory) mile nautical mile (UK) nautical mile (international) mile (statutory) mile (USA, geodetic) mile (Roman) 1000 yards furlong furlong (USA, geodetic) chain chain (USA, geodetic) rope (English rope) genus genus (USA, geodetic) pepper floor (English) . pole) fathom, fathom fathom (US, geodetic) cubit yard foot foot (US, geodetic) link link (US, geodetic) cubit (UK) hand span finger nail inch inch (US, geodetic) barley grain (eng. barleycorn) thousandth of a microinch angstrom atomic unit of length x-unit Fermi arpan soldering typographical point twip cubit (Swedish) fathom (Swedish) caliber centiinch ken arshin actus (Ancient Roman) vara de tarea vara conuquera vara castellana cubit (Greek) long reed reed long elbow palm "finger" Planck length classical electron radius Bohr radius equatorial radius of the Earth polar radius of the Earth distance from the Earth to the Sun radius of the Sun light nanosecond light microsecond light millisecond light second light hour light day light week Billion light years Distance from the Earth to the Moon cables (international) cable length (British) cable length (USA) nautical mile (USA) light minute rack unit horizontal pitch cicero pixel line inch (Russian) inch span foot fathom oblique fathom verst boundary verst

Convert feet and inches to meters and vice versa

foot inch

m

More about length and distance

General information

Length is the largest measurement of the body. In three-dimensional space, length is usually measured horizontally.

Distance is a quantity that determines how far two bodies are from each other.

Measuring distance and length

Units of distance and length

In the SI system, length is measured in meters. Derived units such as kilometer (1000 meters) and centimeter (1/100 meter) are also commonly used in the metric system. Countries that do not use the metric system, such as the US and UK, use units such as inches, feet and miles.

Distance in physics and biology

In biology and physics, lengths are often measured at much less than one millimeter. For this purpose, a special value has been adopted, the micrometer. One micrometer is equal to 1×10⁻⁶ meters. In biology, the size of microorganisms and cells is measured in micrometers, and in physics, the length of infrared electromagnetic radiation is measured. A micrometer is also called a micron and is sometimes, especially in English literature, denoted by the Greek letter µ. Other derivatives of the meter are also widely used: nanometers (1 × 10⁻⁹ meters), picometers (1 × 10⁻¹² meters), femtometers (1 × 10⁻¹⁵ meters and attometers (1 × 10⁻¹⁸ meters).

Navigation distance

Shipping uses nautical miles. One nautical mile is equal to 1852 meters. It was originally measured as an arc of one minute along the meridian, that is, 1/(60x180) of the meridian. This made latitude calculations easier, since 60 nautical miles equaled one degree of latitude. When distance is measured in nautical miles, speed is often measured in knots. One sea knot equals a speed of one nautical mile per hour.

Distance in astronomy

In astronomy, large distances are measured, so special quantities are adopted to facilitate calculations.

Astronomical unit(au, au) is equal to 149,597,870,700 meters. The value of one astronomical unit is a constant, that is, a constant value. It is generally accepted that the Earth is located at a distance of one astronomical unit from the Sun.

Light year equal to 10,000,000,000,000 or 10¹³ kilometers. This is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year. This quantity is used in popular science literature more often than in physics and astronomy.

Parsec approximately equal to 30,856,775,814,671,900 meters or approximately 3.09 × 10¹³ kilometers. One parsec is the distance from the Sun to another astronomical object, such as a planet, star, moon, or asteroid, with an angle of one arcsecond. One arcsecond is 1/3600 of a degree, or approximately 4.8481368 microrads in radians. Parsec can be calculated using parallax - the effect of visible changes in body position, depending on the observation point. When making measurements, lay a segment E1A2 (in the illustration) from the Earth (point E1) to a star or other astronomical object (point A2). Six months later, when the Sun is on the other side of the Earth, a new segment E2A1 is laid from the new position of the Earth (point E2) to the new position in space of the same astronomical object (point A1). In this case, the Sun will be at the intersection of these two segments, at point S. The length of each of the segments E1S and E2S is equal to one astronomical unit. If we plot a segment through point S, perpendicular to E1E2, it will pass through the intersection point of segments E1A2 and E2A1, I. The distance from the Sun to point I is segment SI, it is equal to one parsec, when the angle between segments A1I and A2I is two arcseconds.

On the image:

• A1, A2: apparent star position
• E1, E2: Earth position
• S: Sun position
• I: point of intersection
• IS = 1 parsec
• ∠P or ∠XIA2: parallax angle
• ∠P = 1 arcsecond

Other units

League- an obsolete unit of length previously used in many countries. It is still used in some places, such as the Yucatan Peninsula and rural areas of Mexico. This is the distance a person travels in an hour. Sea League - three nautical miles, approximately 5.6 kilometers. Lieu is a unit approximately equal to a league. In English, both leagues and leagues are called the same, league. In literature, league is sometimes found in the title of books, such as “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” - the famous novel by Jules Verne.

Elbow- an ancient value equal to the distance from the tip of the middle finger to the elbow. This value was widespread in the ancient world, in the Middle Ages, and until modern times.

Yard used in the British Imperial system and is equal to three feet or 0.9144 meters. In some countries, such as Canada, where the metric system is adopted, yards are used to measure fabric and the length of swimming pools and sports fields and fields, such as golf and football courses.

Definition of meter

The definition of meter has changed several times. The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Later, the meter was equal to the length of the platinum-iridium standard. The meter was later equated to the wavelength of the orange line of the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton atom ⁸⁶Kr in a vacuum, multiplied by 1,650,763.73. Today, a meter is defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Computations

In geometry, the distance between two points, A and B, with coordinates A(x₁, y₁) and B(x₂, y₂) is calculated by the formula:

and within a few minutes you will receive an answer.

Calculations for converting units in the converter " Length and distance converter" are performed using unitconversion.org functions.

A light year is the distance that light travels in one year. The International Astronomical Union has given its explanation of the light year - this is the distance that light travels in a vacuum, without the participation of gravity, in a Julian year. The Julian year is equal to 365 days. It is this decoding that is used in scientific literature.

If we take professional literature, then the distance is calculated in parsecs or kilo- and megaparsecs.

There are specific numbers that determine the distance of light hours, minutes, days, etc.

• A light year is equal to 9,460,800,000,000 km,
• month- 788,333 million km.,
• a week- 197,083 million km.,
• day- 26,277 million km,
• hour- 1,094 million km.,
• minute- about 18 million km.,
• second- about 300 thousand km.

This is interesting! From the Earth to the Moon, light travels on average in 1.25 seconds, while its beam reaches the Sun in just over 8 minutes.

The star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion should explode in the foreseeable future (in fact, within a few centuries).

Betelgeuse is located at a distance of 495 to 640 light years from us.
If it explodes right now, then the inhabitants of the Earth will see this explosion only in 500-600 years.

And if you see an explosion today, then remember that in fact the explosion occurred around the time of Ivan the Terrible...

Earth year

An earthly year is the distance traveled by the earth in one year. If we take into account all the calculations, then one light year is equal to 63242 Earth years. This figure applies specifically to planet Earth; for others, such as Mars or Jupiter, they will be completely different. A light year measures the distance from one celestial object to another. The numbers for light years and earth years are so different, although they mean distance.

Scale

Video

Sources

Quick answer: not at all.

We are often asked very interesting questions, the answers to which are very non-standard.

You see one of these questions in the title. And really, how many earthly years are there in one bright year? You may be disappointed, but there is no real answer.

The fact is that a bright year is not a measure of time, but a distance measure. To be more precise, a light year is the distance of distance in a vacuum without gravity fields, one effect of the Julian year (equivalent to 365.25 standard days per 86,400 SI seconds or 31,557,600 seconds) by the International Astronomical Federation.

To do this, we take the 300 thousand kilometers per second mark (that's exactly the speed of light) and multiply it with 31.56 million seconds (many seconds per year) and we get a huge number - 9460800000 000 km (or 9.46 million kilometers). This fantastic number means a distance equal to a light year.

• 1 light month ~ 788,333,000,000 km

• 1 easy week ~ 197,083,000 km

• 1 daylight ~ 26,277 million km

• 1 light hour ~ 1,094 million km

• 1 light minute ~ about 18 million km

• 1 light second ~ 300 thousand km

To find out how many kilometers in a light year you need to use a simple web calculator.

In the left box, enter the number of light years of interest you want to convert. In the field on the right you will see the calculation result. Simply click the appropriate link to convert light years or miles to other units.

What is “bright summer”

The light year of the one-way system (St., ly) is equal to the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in one July year (365.25 days).

The term is mainly used in science and fiction, and in professional circles the term "parsecs" has been adopted, with the prefixes "kilo" and "mega".

and not before 1984, according to the bright year, to understand the distance with light traveled in the tropical year, now the value has changed by 0.002%, and the practical value of this difference is because very accurate measurements are not made in bright years. The speed of light is about 300 thousand.

km per second and a luminous year of about 10 trillion kilometers (9460.8800 million km). Regarding distances, for example, Sirius is 8 light years from its closest proximity to the star Proxima Centauri - 4.22 light years, and the diameter of the Roman road - our galaxy, which is 100,000 light years.

What is a "kilometer"

The kilometer kilometer (km, km) is a plural unit of reference distances, widely used throughout the world.

One kilometer 1000 meters, 0.621 miles, 0.9374 miles, 1094 yards, 3281 meters, 1.057 x 10 - 13 light years, 6.67 x 10 - 9 astronomical units.

Easy years

For hundreds of years, people have been inventing their own planet to invent more and more remote sensing systems. Therefore, it was decided to take into account a universal unit of one meter in length and a long measuring path of kilometers.

But in the next twentieth century, this created a new problem for humanity. People began to carefully study the universe - and it turned out that the size of the universe is so large that miles are simply not suitable here.

In ordinary units you can express the distance from the Earth to the Moon or from the Earth to Mars. But if you're trying to figure out how far the nearest star is from our planet, the number "grows" with an imperceptible number of characters per decimal point.

What is 1 light year?

It was obvious that a new space exploration unit was needed - and it was a bright year.

In a second, light travels 300,000 kilometers. Easy years — this is the distance whose light will travel exactly a year, and when translated into a more familiar system of numbers, this distance is 9,460,730,472,580.8 kilometers. It is clear that using a concise “simple flight” is much more convenient than using every huge number in the calculations.

Of all the stars closest to us, Proxima Centauri was only “4.2 light years away.” Of course, based on kilometer data there is an unimaginable amount. However, everything is relative - considering that the nearest Andromeda galaxy is separated from the Roman road by as much as 2.5 million light years, the star and the truth begin to seem very close neighbors.

By the way, using light years helps scientists understand in which corners of space it is reasonable to find intelligent life and where sending radio signals is completely useless.

After all, the speed of a radio signal is similar to the speed of light, so a greeting sent towards a distant galaxy would take millions of years to reach its destination. It makes sense to expect a response from neighboring “neighbors” - objects whose hypothetical response signals will reach ground-based devices even during a person’s lifetime.

1 light year - how many Earth years?

There is a common misconception that a light year is a unit of time.

Actually this is not true. This term has nothing to do with Earth years, it does not refer to them and only represents the distance that light travels in one Earth year.

One way or another, in our daily lives we measure distances: to the nearest supermarket, to a relative’s house in another city, to, and so on. However, when it comes to the vastness of outer space, it turns out that using familiar values ​​like kilometers is extremely irrational. And the point here is not only in the difficulty of perceiving the resulting gigantic values, but in the number of numbers in them. Even writing so many zeros will become a problem. For example, the shortest distance from Mars to Earth is 55.7 million kilometers. Six zeros! But the red planet is one of our closest neighbors in the sky. How to use the cumbersome numbers that result when calculating the distance even to the nearest stars? And right now we need such a value as a light year. How much is it equal? Let's figure it out now.

The concept of a light year is also closely related to relativistic physics, in which the close connection and mutual dependence of space and time was established at the beginning of the 20th century, when the postulates of Newtonian mechanics collapsed. Before this distance value, larger scale units in the system

were formed quite simply: each subsequent one was a collection of units of a smaller order (centimeters, meters, kilometers, and so on). In the case of a light year, distance was tied to time. Modern science knows that the speed of light propagation in a vacuum is constant. Moreover, it is the maximum speed in nature admissible in modern relativistic physics. It was these ideas that formed the basis of the new meaning. A light year is equal to the distance a ray of light travels in one Earth calendar year. In kilometers it is approximately 9.46 * 10 15 kilometers. Interestingly, a photon travels the distance to the nearest Moon in 1.3 seconds. It's about eight minutes to the sun. But the next closest stars, Alpha, are already about four light years away.

Just a fantastic distance. There is an even larger measure of space in astrophysics. A light year is equal to about one-third of a parsec, an even larger unit of measurement of interstellar distances.

Speed ​​of light propagation under different conditions

By the way, there is also such a feature that photons can propagate at different speeds in different environments. We already know how fast they fly in a vacuum. And when they say that a light year is equal to the distance covered by light in a year, they mean empty outer space. However, it is interesting to note that under other conditions the speed of light may be lower. For example, in air, photons scatter at a slightly lower speed than in vacuum. Which one depends on the specific state of the atmosphere. Thus, in a gas-filled environment, the light year would be somewhat smaller. However, it would not differ significantly from the accepted one.

Exploring their own planet, over hundreds of years, people invented more and more new systems for measuring distance segments. As a result, it was decided to consider one meter as the universal unit of length, and measure the long distance in kilometers.

But the advent of the twentieth century presented humanity with a new problem. People began to carefully study space - and it turned out that the vastness of the Universe is so vast that kilometers are simply not suitable here. In conventional units you can still express the distance from the Earth to the Moon or from the Earth to Mars. But if you try to determine how many kilometers the nearest star is from our planet, the number “overgrows” with an unimaginable number of decimal places.

What is 1 light year equal to?

It became obvious that a new unit of measurement was needed to explore the spaces of space - and the light year became it. In one second, light travels 300,000 kilometers. Light year - this is the distance that light will travel in exactly one year - and translated into a more familiar number system, this distance is equal to 9,460,730,472,580.8 kilometers. It is clear that using the laconic “one light year” is much more convenient than using this huge figure in calculations every time.

Of all the stars, Proxima Centauri is closest to us - it is “only” 4.22 light years away. Of course, in terms of kilometers the figure will be unimaginably huge. However, everything is learned in comparison - if you consider that the nearest galaxy called Andromeda is as much as 2.5 million light years away from the Milky Way, the above-mentioned star really begins to seem like a very close neighbor.

By the way, using light years helps scientists understand in which corners of the Universe it makes sense to look for intelligent life, and where sending radio signals is completely useless. After all, the speed of a radio signal is similar to the speed of light - accordingly, a greeting sent towards a distant galaxy will reach its destination only after millions of years. It is more reasonable to expect an answer from closer “neighbors” - objects whose hypothetical response signals will reach earthly devices at least during a person’s lifetime.

1 light year is how many Earth years?

There is a widespread misconception that the light year is a unit of time. In fact, this is not true. The term has nothing to do with earthly years, does not correlate with them in any way and refers exclusively to the distance that light travels in one earthly year.

It is this definition that is recommended for use in popular science literature. In professional literature, parsecs and multiples of units (kilo- and megaparsecs) are usually used instead of light years to express large distances.

Previously (before 1984), a light year was the distance traveled by light in one tropical year, assigned to the epoch 1900.0. The new definition differs from the old one by approximately 0.002%. Since this unit of distance is not used for high-precision measurements, there is no practical difference between the old and new definitions.

Numeric values

A light year is equal to:

• 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters (approximately 9.5 petameters)

Related units

The following units are used quite rarely, usually only in popular publications:

• 1 light second = 299,792.458 km (exact)
• 1 light minute ≈ 18 million km
• 1 light hour ≈ 1079 million km
• 1 light day ≈ 26 billion km
• 1 light week ≈ 181 billion km
• 1 light month ≈ 790 billion km

Distance in light years

The light year is convenient for qualitatively representing distance scales in astronomy.

Scale	Value (St. years)	Description
Seconds	4 10 −8	The average distance to the Moon is approximately 380,000 km. This means that a beam of light emitted from the surface of the Earth will take about 1.3 seconds to reach the surface of the Moon.
minutes	1.6·10−5	One astronomical unit is equal to approximately 150 million kilometers. Thus, light travels from the Sun to Earth in approximately 500 seconds (8 minutes 20 seconds).
Watch	0,0006	The average distance from the Sun to Pluto is approximately 5 light hours.
	0,0016	The Pioneer and Voyager series devices flying beyond the solar system, in about 30 years since launch, have moved to a distance of about one hundred astronomical units from the Sun, and their response time to requests from Earth is approximately 14 hours.
Year	1,6	The inner edge of the hypothetical Oort cloud is located at 50,000 AU. e. from the Sun, and the outer one - 100,000 a. e. It will take about a year and a half for light to travel the distance from the Sun to the outer edge of the cloud.
	2,0	The maximum radius of the region of gravitational influence of the Sun (“Hill Spheres”) is approximately 125,000 AU. e.
	4,22	The closest star to us (not counting the Sun), Proxima Centauri, is located at a distance of 4.22 light years. of the year .
Millennium	26 000	The center of our Galaxy is approximately 26,000 light-years from the Sun.
	100 000	The diameter of the disk of our Galaxy is 100,000 light years.
Millions of years	2.5 10 6	The closest spiral galaxy to us, M31, the famous Andromeda Galaxy, is 2.5 million light years away.
	3.14 10 6	The Triangulum Galaxy (M33) is located 3.14 million light-years away and is the most distant stationary object visible to the naked eye.
	5.9 10 7	The closest cluster of galaxies, the Virgo cluster, is 59 million light-years away.
	1.5 10 8 - 2.5 10 8	The “Great Attractor” gravitational anomaly is located at a distance of 150-250 million light years from us.
Billions of years	1.2 10 9	The Great Wall of Sloan is one of the largest formations in the Universe, its dimensions are about 350 Mpc. It will take about a billion years for light to travel from end to end.
	1.4 10 10	The size of the causally connected region of the Universe. It is calculated from the age of the Universe and the maximum speed of information transmission - the speed of light.
4.57 10 10	The accompanying distance from the Earth to the edge of the observable Universe in any direction; accompanying radius of the observable Universe (within the framework of the standard cosmological model Lambda-CDM).

Galactic distance scales

• An astronomical unit with good accuracy is equal to 500 light seconds, that is, light reaches the Earth from the Sun in about 500 seconds.

see also

Links

1. International Organization for Standardization. 9.2 Measurement units

Notes

Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.

See what “Light Year” is in other dictionaries:

An extra-system unit of length used in astronomy; 1 S.g. is equal to the distance traveled by light in 1 year. 1 S. g. = 0.3068 parsec = 9.4605 1015 m. Physical encyclopedic dictionary. M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. Editor-in-Chief A. M. Prokhorov... ... Physical encyclopedia

LIGHT YEAR, a unit of astronomical distance equal to the distance that light travels in outer space or in a VACUUM in one tropical year. One light year is equal to 9.46071012 km... Scientific and technical encyclopedic dictionary

LIGHT YEAR, a unit of length used in astronomy: the path traveled by light in 1 year, i.e. 9.466?1012 km. The distance to the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is approximately 4.3 light years. The most distant stars in the Galaxy are located on... ... Modern encyclopedia

Unit of interstellar distances; the path that light travels in a year, i.e. 9.46? 1012 km... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

Light year- LIGHT YEAR, a unit of length used in astronomy: the path traveled by light in 1 year, i.e. 9.466´1012 km. The distance to the nearest star (Proxima Centauri) is approximately 4.3 light years. The most distant stars in the Galaxy are located on... ... Illustrated Encyclopedic Dictionary

An extra-system unit of length used in astronomy. 1 light year is the distance that light travels in 1 year. 1 light year is equal to 9.4605E+12 km = 0.307 pc... Astronomical Dictionary

Unit of interstellar distances; the path that light travels in a year, that is, 9.46·1012 km. * * * LIGHT YEAR LIGHT YEAR, a unit of interstellar distances; the path that light travels in a year, i.e. 9.46×1012 km... encyclopedic Dictionary

Light year- a unit of distance equal to the path traveled by light in one year. A light year is equal to 0.3 parsecs... Concepts of modern natural science. Glossary of basic terms