A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year.
5,865,696,000,000 miles or 9,460,800,000,000 kilometres
This can be worked out because we know how far light travels in a second (186,000 miles per second / 300,000kilometers per second), we can therefore use simple maths to work out the answer.
186,000 miles/second x 60 seconds/minute x 60 minutes/hour x 24 hours/day x 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year.
Never - its not alive. But it has existed for many billions of years, almost 13.
well it depends on what you are measuring your 'much' in. First thing is, a light year is a distance not a time. It is defined as the distance light would travel in the time of one human year. Now to define this: light travels at ~300000000ms-1 and there are 31536000s in one year, so light will travel: 300000000*31536000 = 9.5x1015 metres in one year (that is 95 followed by 14 zeros! so a long distance) so in 9.7 light years light will travel 9.2x1016 metres. Which is a very very long distance.
About 4.2 light years
One meter is about 0.000,000,000,000,000,105,7 light-years.Calculation: As a light-year is 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters, one meter equals 1/9,460,528,400,000,000 light-years = 1.057,000,834,024,615,4 × 10-16 light-years - or about 105.7 atto-light-years.
The sun is not light years away but light minutes and the sun is 8 (rounded) light minutes away from us. But if you really want to know how far away the sun is from us in light years it is 0.000015 of a light year away from us.
50,000 light years (thats long)
8.7 light-years is 51,144,039,300,000 miles.
The Milky Way's diameter is about 100,000 light-years.
Traveling 39 light years would take 39 years at the speed of light.
Traveling 40 light years would take 40 years at the speed of light.
light years
14 Billion years
That means that M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) is at a distance of about 2.5 million light-years, and that it takes the light 2.5 million years to get here. Light moves quickly, but not instantaneously.
It's exactly 7 light years away.One light year is the distance that light travels through space in one year.7 of those is a distance of something like 41,150,289,900,000 miles.
6,300 years
40 light years is equivalent to a distance of about 235 trillion miles.
The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years in diameter; it would take light about 100,000 years to cover the whole distance.