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You can use kilometer, but end up with fairly large numbers, which are best written in scientific notation. It is quite possible to deal with those, but perhaps due to a lack of familiarity of the general public with scientific notation, light-years and parsecs are often used instead. When using these units, you end up with smaller numbers. For example, the distance to the nearest star (after the Sun) is about 4.2 light-years; each light-year is about 9.5 x 1012 km, that is a 13-digit number if you write it out.

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Q: Why Kilometre is not a convenient unit to measure distances in the universe?
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