A Light year- interesting you know

A unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, which is 9.4607 × 10¹² km is called Light Year.

So we can say that A light-year is how astronomers measure distance in space. It’s defined by how far a beam of light travels in one year – a distance of six trillion miles. Think of it as the bigger, badder cousin of the inch, the mile, the kilometer, and the furlong. If you like to keep up with what’s going on in astronomy, it’s worth spending a little bit of time understanding what the deal is with this funny unit of measurement.

                             

light is convenient. Throughout the universe, all light travels at exactly the same speed: about 670 million miles per hour. We don’t usually think about light traveling anywhere because when we flick on a light switch – there it is! We don’t have to wait for the room to light up. It happens instantaneously. Except that it’s not instantaneous, just insanely fast. In fact, let’s pause for a second and reflect on how ludicrously quick the speed of light is.

                          

If you could travel at the speed of light, you could circle the globe of Earth almost eight times in one second.

So if you were to travel off the Earth in a straight line at light speed, you’d get pretty far in the same amount of time, right? Actually, since space is so vast, you wouldn’t have even made it to the moon. Travel to the moon takes about a second-and-a-half, at light speed. Travel to the sun at light speed takes about eight minutes. Can you even imagine? Traveling at a speed where you cross nearly 200,000 miles every second for eight full minutes would only get you to the center of our solar system.

                        

A light beam needs only 8 minutes to travel the 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the sun to the Earth.