How many meters are there in a lightyear?

Answer 1

One light year is the distance that light travels in one year.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or 300,000 kilometers per second.

There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 365.26 days in a year. Just multiply all those numbers together to get one light year, then multiply by three to get three light years.

Answer 2

Sorry but a lightyear is a unit of distance not of time. It is the distance that light travels in one year.

One light year is 5.87849981 × 1012 miles

Answer 3

300,000*60secs in a minute*60 mins im a hour*24hours in a day*365 in

a year=9460800000/9.46*10^9metres (^=to the power of..)

Just a straight answer please haha, so that's about (thinking music- doo da doo da dooooooo)

946000000000 to power of 9? or am I wrong

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January 2011:

Today, we got 9.46 x 1015 meters. Maybe light has incredibly accelerated

since the first answer was posted.

But wait! Don't go away. We've found the problem. The first guy was on

exactly the right track but, tragically, where his analysis was conceptually

perfect, his execution was fatally flawed, and he wound up on the short side

by the factor of 106.

Just look at the top two lines up there:

First of all ... that "300,000" right at the beginning is the correct figure for kilometers,

but he used it for meters.

Next, if you multiply out all the factors he lists up there, you get 9.46 x 1012,

not 109.

So he dropped 103 once in his speed-of-light units, and again either when he

punched the numbers into the calculator or else when he read them out.

It's 9.46 x 1015 meters, rounded to the nearest ten thousand billion meters.

Answer 4

The two units are not convertible. Day is a unit of time. A light-year isn't a measure of time, it's a measure of distance. It's equal to the distance that light travels in one year.

Light takes time to travel from one location to another. When you turn on a flashlight and shine it at an object, it may seem that the object is illuminated instantly, with no time passing, but there actually is a small amount of time between the time that you turn on the switch until the light hits the object then about the same amount of time for the light to reflect back to your eye and only then will you 'see' the object. Just like if you are talking to somebody in a room, the sound appears to pretty much instantly travel from the person's mouth to your ears, but if you are in a canyon, you can yell then maybe a second later hear your echo. Light works the same way, but on a much faster scale.

With light traveling at approximately 186,000 miles per second (sound travels only about 0.2 miles per second, by comparison), multiplied by how many seconds in a year, one light year equals 5.8785 e+12 miles. To help put this in perspective, if the sun "burned out", we wouldn't know it for eight minutes. Try to visualize how far that could travel in a whole year!

Similarly, a light minute is the distance that light travels in one minute. For example, Earth is 8 light minutes distant from the Sun. (93,000,000 miles)

While all of this may seem too 'large scale' to be pertinent, the fact that light has a constant speed, is useful to the development to some devices which you may experience or take advantage of.

1. RADAR sends a beam of electromagnetic waves (not visible light, but it travels at the speed of light), which then bounces off of an object and reflects back. The RADAR unit measures the amount of time it took to reflect back, then using the known speed of light, can calculate how far away the object is.
2. GPS devices take advantage of the fact that the radio signals (again traveling at the same constant speed of light) will reach your device at different times, depending on how far away the satellite is from you. The satellites 'know' where they are, and with enough signals received, the computer program inside your GPS device can calculate it's own position.

Answer 5

A light-year is exactly 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters.

This is about 9.5 × 1015 meters, or about 9.5 quadrillion meters.

It is defined as the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year. As a Julian year is defined as exactly 365.25 days, and the speed of light in a vacuum is defined as exactly 299,792,458 meters/second, a light year is

365.25 days × (24 hours/day) × (60 minutes/hour) × (60 seconds/minute) × 299,792,458 meters/second = 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters.

This is not an approximation but an exact number due to the definitions of a Julian year and the speed of light.

Answer 6

The question actually makes technical sense, but that's probably not due to any

fundamental comprehension on the part of the questioner.

The 'light year' is not a length of time. It's a distance. The definition is: The distance

that light travels in one year, when in a vacuum.

Consistent with that system of nomenclature, we would have to admit that a 'light minute' is

also a distance, and might similarly be defined as the distance that light travels in one minute,

when in a vacuum.

So, the question makes a kooky kind of sense, and the answer is: Since there are

525,931 minutes of time in one year of time, there are also 525,931 light minutes

of distance in one light year of distance.

Answer 7

A light-year is exactly 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters.

This is about 9.5 × 1015 meters, or about 9.5 quadrillion meters.

It is defined as the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year. As a Julian year is defined as exactly 365.25 days, and the speed of light in a vacuum is defined as exactly 299,792,458 meters/second, a light year is

365.25 days × (24 hours/day) × (60 minutes/hour) × (60 seconds/minute) × 299,792,458 meters/second = 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters.

This is not an approximation but an exact number due to the definitions of a Julian year and the speed of light.

Answer 8

One light year is the distance that light travels in one year.

Light travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second, or 300,000,000 meters per second.

There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and there are 365.24 days per year.

Multiply all those numbers together to see how many meters are in a light-year.

Answer 9

A light year does not travel, because it is a distance (= how far light travels in a vacuum in a year). In a day, light will travel a distance of 1 light-year divided by about 365.25 . Light travels about 300 thousand km per sec, and there are 86400 seconds in a day. So in ordinary distance units a light year is a huge number, so people in astronomy deal in units of light years instead.

Answer 10

A lightyear is equivalent to about 9.461 trillion kilometers or approximately 9.461 quadrillion meters.