• Question: What is a light year?

    Asked by anon-190527 to Matt, Maia, Lyndsay, Liam, Dionne, Brendan on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Dionne Turnbull

      Dionne Turnbull answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      I confess I had to ask my office mate about this one… it’s the distance that light travels in a year, which is about 6 million million miles.
      ‘Light years’ is also a groovy song by one of my all time favourite bands Jamiroquai!

    • Photo: Matt Bower

      Matt Bower answered on 5 Nov 2018:

      Yep – agree with that. It’s a measure of distance we use for things very far away (like stars). So the sun is about 8.3 light minutes away from Earth (That’s how long it takes light to get to us from the Sun). The nearest star to us (apart from the Sun) is about 4.2 light years away.

    • Photo: Brendan Marrinan

      Brendan Marrinan answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      This isn’t my area of expertise but from my knowledge of Star Trek it’s a measure of distance determined by the amount of time taken for light travel from one point to another……but Dionne and Matt have done a much better job of answering than I have.

    • Photo: Liam Taylor

      Liam Taylor answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      The others have answered this one perfectly, so I’ll just go for a cool fact. We know that light years measure distance…. so how big is all of space?! So far, we think it’s about 93 billion light-years across :O

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