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A light-year, alternatively spelled light year (ly or lyr [3]), is a unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equal to exactly 9 460 730 472 580.8 km, which is approximately 9.46 trillion km or 5.88 trillion mi.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy with a D 25 isophotal diameter estimated at 26.8 ± 1.1 kiloparsecs (87,400 ± 3,600 light-years), [10] but only about 1,000 light-years thick at the spiral arms (more at the bulge).
The name describes the galaxy's appearance from the Earth: a hazy band of light visible in the night sky, formed from billions of stars that cannot be individually distinguished by the naked eye. The Milky Way Galaxy has a diameter of 100,000–200,000 light-years and is estimated to contain 100–400 billion stars and at least that number of ...
Euclid initially captured an image of a well-observed galaxy named NGC 6505, which is located about 590 million light-years from Earth, in 2023. A light-year is the distance light travels in one ...
Distance light travels in one day — Light-year: 63 241 — Distance light travels in one Julian year (365.25 days) — Oort cloud: 75 000: ± 25 000: 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 ...
A potentially habitable exoplanet that is roughly similar in size to Earth has been found in a system located 40 light-years away, according to a new study.
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]
For comparison, the diameter of a typical galaxy is 30,000 light-years (9,198 parsecs), and the typical distance between two neighboring galaxies is 3 million light-years (919.8 kiloparsecs). [52] As an example, the Milky Way is roughly 100,000–180,000 light-years in diameter, [ 53 ] [ 54 ] and the nearest sister galaxy to the Milky Way, the ...