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The product of Simon Newcomb's J1900.0 mean tropical year of 31 556 925.9747 ephemeris seconds and a speed of light of 299 792.5 km/s produced a light-year of 9.460 530 × 10 15 m (rounded to the seven significant digits in the speed of light) found in several modern sources [10] [11] [12] was probably derived from an old source such as C. W ...
Distance of the outer limit of Oort cloud from the Sun (estimated, corresponds to 1.2 light-years) — Parsec: 206 265 — One parsec. The parsec is defined in terms of the astronomical unit, is used to measure distances beyond the scope of the Solar System and is about 3.26 light-years: 1 pc = 1 au/tan(1″) [60] [61] Proxima Centauri: 268 000 ...
This number is likely much higher, due to the sheer number of stars needed to be surveyed; a star approaching the Solar System 10 million years ago, moving at a typical Sun-relative 20–200 kilometers per second, would be 600–6,000 light-years from the Sun at present day, with millions of stars closer to the Sun.
A megaparsec is one million parsecs, or about 3,260,000 light years. [22] Sometimes, galactic distances are given in units of Mpc/ h (as in "50/ h Mpc", also written " 50 Mpc h −1 "). h is a constant (the " dimensionless Hubble constant ") in the range 0.5 < h < 0.75 reflecting the uncertainty in the value of the Hubble constant H for the ...
A light-year is the distance light travels in one Julian year, around 9461 billion kilometres, 5879 billion miles, or 0.3066 parsecs. In round figures, a light year is nearly 10 trillion kilometres or nearly 6 trillion miles. Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth after the Sun, is around 4.2 light-years away. [89]
24 Zm – 2.5 million light-years – distance to the Andromeda Galaxy, the nearest major galaxy. 30.8568 Zm – 3.2616 million light-years – 1 megaparsec; 40 Zm – 4.2 million light-years – distance to the IC 10, a distant member of the Local Group of galaxies; 49.2 Zm – 5.2 million light-years – width of the Local Group of galaxies
The amount of shift is quite small, even for the nearest stars, measuring 1 arcsecond for an object at 1 parsec's distance (3.26 light-years), and thereafter decreasing in angular amount as the distance increases. Astronomers usually express distances in units of parsecs (parallax arcseconds); light-years are used in popular media.
The Hubble constant is most frequently quoted in km/s/Mpc, which gives the speed of a galaxy 1 megaparsec (3.09 × 10 19 km) away as 70 km/s. Simplifying the units of the generalized form reveals that H 0 specifies a frequency (SI unit: s −1 ), leading the reciprocal of H 0 to be known as the Hubble time (14.4 billion years).