Sam1060 Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Hi all i am new from oldham but i have always wondered How far/big is a light year? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr Spock Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 A light year is about 5,878,000,000,000 miles... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
perkil8r Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Approx 6 trillion miles. It's the distance that light would travel in a year I think. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparrow Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 To try and give you an idea to grasp it - if you could bend a light beam round the Earth, it would travel round the Earth about 7 times in one second. (one light second is 186,000 miles).It would travel round the Earh 31,536,000 times in a year. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KevG Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Given that light travels at 186000 mps, then it's 5869588236000, or five thousand eight hundred & sixty nine billion, five hundred & eighty eight million, two hundred and thirty six thousand (I think) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cornelius Varley Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 It's a long way.Peter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tinker1947 Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 I doubt your Bus Pass will cover the journey when you get one.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
M4lcs67 Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 I read somewhere that a manmade probe/satellite travelling through space would take 18,000 earth years to travel 1 lightyear. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sam1060 Posted January 19, 2012 Author Share Posted January 19, 2012 WOW! I really thought it would be a lot shorter thx very much for the replies Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sabana Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Buzz Lightyear said it "To Infinity and beyond". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ad Astra Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 The light year is a simple concept to describe, but not always easy to grasp.Light travels about 300,000 km per second. (186,000 miles/sec if your are interested!) At that rate, the Moon is about 1.5 seconds away, the Sun is 8 minutes away, Saturn about 1.5 hours away, and Pluto (yes, it IS a planet!) is about 12 hours away.Our entire solar system is about 1 light-day wide. The nearest star system is roughly 4.5 light years away - about 1600 times farther. Trouble is, there are no convienient markers between the two. Solar systems are generally on the scale of light hours or at most light days, while stars (even in dense clusters) are usually separated by many light years - a distance thousands of times greater.The scale (and emptiness) of the Universe is hard to grasp. A professor of mine built a scale model of the solar system with the Earth as a 1-inch globe. The sun was a 12-ft globe (a yellow dome tent was used as a stand in on campus!), and Jupiter was a 1-ft ball. The model spread across several states. Individual globes were hung in roadside convenience stores and students could get extra credit by taking a journey to 'one of the planets', then photographing yourself in front of the displayed planet - and attaching a reciept from the store! On this scale, Pluto was something like 600 miles away (about a 12-14 hour drive!) Still, even at this scale, (12,000 miles to the inch!) the nearest star would have been 4 times farther away than the Moon!Hope that helps!Dan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sam1060 Posted January 19, 2012 Author Share Posted January 19, 2012 N how long does it take to get to then moon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunshine185 Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Where bouts in Oldham are you? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sam1060 Posted January 19, 2012 Author Share Posted January 19, 2012 Chadderton y r u local Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunshine185 Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 Hollins, near Manchester road. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rowan46 Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 N how long does it take to get to then moondepends which bus from oldham you catch stagecoach recently cut the direct route:) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunshine185 Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 Buses in Oldham? We still have horse drawn carriages up here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Squagnut Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 If light-years stretch the imagination beyond comprehension, wait 'til you try the parsec ...The way I explain why humans have such problems grasping the enormous distances in space is by using human history; we evolved to survive on this lump of wet rock by throwing sticks at cows. Although we have accumulated more knowledge, modern humans are exactly the same creatures as bronze-age humans, and an understanding of interstellar distances is academic - it's not been essential to our survival. This may change, of course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rowan46 Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 I believe the journey time to the moon for apollo 11 was about 3days Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ollypenrice Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 Like many other keen cyclists I've done enough miles, by bike, to get to the moon. A typical club racing cyclist riding non stop at 25mph would, therefore, take a little over a year to get there. I always find that a bit surpising. It's not all that far away. The stars, on the other hand.... uh-oh!What confuses people about the Lightyear is simply that it is a unit of distance, not of time, despite containing the word 'year.'Olly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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