A light year is the distance that light travels in one year. The International Astronomical Union has given its explanation of the light year - this is the distance that light travels in a vacuum, without the participation of gravity, in a Julian year. The Julian year is equal to 365 days. It is this decoding that is used in scientific literature.
If you take professional literature, then the distance is calculated in parsecs or kilo- and megaparsecs.
There are specific numbers that determine the distance of light hours, minutes, days, etc.
- A light year is equal to 9,460,800,000,000 km,
- month- 788,333 million km.,
- a week- 197,083 million km.,
- day- 26,277 million km,
- hour- 1,094 million km.,
- minute- about 18 million km.,
- second- about 300 thousand km.
This is interesting! From the Earth to the Moon, light travels on average in 1.25 seconds, while its beam reaches the Sun in just over 8 minutes.
The star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion should explode in the foreseeable future (in fact, within a few centuries).
Betelgeuse is located at a distance of 495 to 640 light years from us.
If it explodes right now, then the inhabitants of the Earth will see this explosion only in 500-600 years.
And if you see an explosion today, then remember that in fact the explosion occurred around the time of Ivan the Terrible...
Earth year
An earthly year is the distance traveled by the earth in one year. If we take into account all the calculations, then one light year is equal to 63242 Earth years. This figure applies specifically to planet Earth; for others, such as Mars or Jupiter, they will be completely different. A light year calculates the distance from one object celestial body to another. The numbers for light years and earth years are so different, although they mean distance.
Scale
Video
Sources
Quick answer: not at all.
We are often asked very interesting questions, the answers to which are very non-standard.
You see one of these questions in the title. And really, how many earthly years are there in one bright year? You may be disappointed, but there is no real answer.
The fact is that a bright year is not a measure of time, but a distance measure. To be more precise, a light year is the distance of distance in a vacuum without gravity fields, one effect of the Julian year (equivalent to 365.25 standard days per 86,400 SI seconds or 31,557,600 seconds) by the International Astronomical Federation.
To do this, we take the 300 thousand kilometers per second mark (that's exactly the speed of light) and multiply it with 31.56 million seconds (many seconds per year) and we get a huge number - 9460800000 000 km (or 9.46 million kilometers). This fantastic number means a distance equal to a light year.
- 1 light month ~ 788,333,000,000 km
- 1 easy week ~ 197,083,000 km
- 1 daylight ~ 26,277 million km
- 1 light hour ~ 1,094 million km
- 1 light minute ~ about 18 million km
- 1 light second ~ 300 thousand km
To find out how many kilometers in a light year you need to use a simple web calculator.
In the left box, enter the number of light years of interest you want to convert. In the field on the right you will see the calculation result. Simply click the appropriate link to convert light years or miles to other units.
What is “bright summer”
The light year of the one-way system (St., ly) is equal to the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in one July year (365.25 days).
This term is mainly used in science and fiction, and in the professional environment the term “parsecs” with the prefix “kilo” and “mega” was adopted.
and not before 1984, according to the bright year, to understand the distance with light traveled in the tropical year, now the value has changed by 0.002%, and the practical value of this difference is because very accurate measurements are not made in bright years. The speed of light is about 300 thousand.
km per second and a luminous year of about 10 trillion kilometers (9460.8800 million km). Regarding distances, for example, Sirius is 8 light years from its closest proximity to the star Proxima Centauri - 4.22 light years, and the diameter of the Roman road - our galaxy, which is 100,000 light years.
What is a "kilometer"
The kilometer kilometer (km, km) is a plural unit of reference distances, widely used throughout the world.
One kilometer 1000 meters, 0.621 miles, 0.9374 miles, 1094 yards, 3281 meters, 1.057 x 10 - 13 light years, 6.67 x 10 - 9 astronomical units.
Easy years
For hundreds of years, people have been inventing their own planet to invent more and more remote sensing systems. Therefore, it was decided to take into account a universal unit of one meter in length and a long measuring path of kilometers.
But in the next twentieth century, this created a new problem for humanity. People began to carefully study the universe - and it turned out that the size of the universe is so large that miles are simply not suitable here.
In ordinary units you can express the distance from the Earth to the Moon or from the Earth to Mars. But if you're trying to figure out how far the nearest star is from our planet, the number "grows" with an imperceptible number of characters per decimal point.
What is 1 light year?
It was obvious that a new space exploration unit was needed - and it was a bright year.
In a second, light travels 300,000 kilometers. Easy years — this is the distance whose light will travel exactly a year, and when translated into a more familiar system of numbers, this distance is 9,460,730,472,580.8 kilometers. It is clear that using a concise “simple flight” is much more convenient than using every huge number in the calculations.
Of all the stars closest to us, Proxima Centauri was only “4.2 light years away.” Of course, based on kilometer data there is an unimaginable amount. However, everything is relative - considering that the nearest Andromeda galaxy is separated from the Roman road by as much as 2.5 million light years, the star and the truth begin to seem very close neighbors.
By the way, using light years helps scientists understand in which corners of space it is reasonable to find intelligent life and where sending radio signals is completely useless.
After all, the speed of a radio signal is similar to the speed of light, so a greeting sent towards a distant galaxy would take millions of years to reach its destination. It makes sense to expect a response from neighboring “neighbors” - objects whose hypothetical response signals will reach ground-based devices even during a person’s lifetime.
1 light year - how many Earth years?
There is a common misconception that a light year is a unit of time.
Actually this is not true. This term has nothing to do with Earth years, it does not refer to them and only represents the distance that light travels in one Earth year.
Despite the fact that its name is similar to the time period year, the year does not measure time at all, but distance. This unit is designed to measure huge .
A light year is a non-systemic unit of length. This is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one year (365.25 days or 31,557,600 seconds).
The comparison of a light year with a calendar year began to be used after 1984. Before that, a light year was the distance traveled by light in one tropical year.
The length of the tropical year does not have an exact value, since its calculations are related to angular velocity The sun, and there are variations for it. The average value was taken for a light year.
The difference in calculation between the tropical light year and the light year relative to the Julian calendar is 0.02 percent. And since this unit is not used for high-precision measurements, there is no practical difference between them.
The light year as a length is used in popular science literature. In astronomy, there is another non-systemic unit for measuring large distances - the parsec. The parsec calculation is based on the average radius of the Earth's orbit. 1 parsec is equal to 3.2616 light years.
Calculations and distances
The calculation of a light year is directly related to the speed of light. For calculations in physics, it is usually taken equal to 300,000,000 m/s. The exact speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. That is, 299,792,458 meters is just one light second!
The distance to the Moon is approximately 384,400,000 meters, which means that the light beam will reach the surface of the Moon in approximately 1.28 seconds.
The distance from the Sun to the Earth is 149,600,000,000. Therefore, a solar ray hits the Earth in just under 7 minutes.
So there are 31,557,600 seconds in a year. Multiplying this number by a distance equal to one light second, we obtain that one light year is equal to 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters.
1 million light years will correspondingly be equal to 9,460,730,472,580,800,000,000 meters.
According to rough calculations by astronomers, the diameter of our Galaxy is about 100,000 light years. That is, within our Galaxy there cannot be distances measured by millions of light years. Such numbers are useful for measuring distances between galaxies.
The closest galaxy to Earth, the Andromeda galaxy, is 2.5 million light years away.
Today, the greatest cosmic distance from Earth that can be measured is the distance to the edge of the observable Universe. It is about 45 billion light years away.
A light year is the distance that light travels in one year. The International Astronomical Union has given its explanation of the light year - this is the distance that light travels in a vacuum, without the participation of gravity, in a Julian year. The Julian year is equal to 365 days. It is this decoding that is used in scientific literature.
If we take professional literature, then the distance is calculated in parsecs or kilo- and megaparsecs.
There are specific numbers that determine the distance of light hours, minutes, days, etc.
- A light year is equal to 9,460,800,000,000 km,
- month- 788,333 million km.,
- a week- 197,083 million km.,
- day- 26,277 million km,
- hour- 1,094 million km.,
- minute- about 18 million km.,
- second- about 300 thousand km.
This is interesting! From the Earth to the Moon, light travels on average in 1.25 seconds, while its beam reaches the Sun in just over 8 minutes.
Interesting fact about the nature of the universe
The star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion should explode in the foreseeable future (in fact, within a few centuries).
Betelgeuse is located at a distance of 495 to 640 light years from us.
If it explodes right now, then the inhabitants of the Earth will see this explosion only in 500-600 years.
And if you see an explosion today, then remember that in fact the explosion occurred around the time of Ivan the Terrible...
Earth year
An earthly year is the distance traveled by the earth in one year. If we take into account all the calculations, then one light year is equal to 63242 Earth years. This figure applies specifically to planet Earth; for others, such as Mars or Jupiter, they will be completely different. A light year measures the distance from one celestial object to another. The numbers for light years and earth years are so different, although they mean distance.
What is the age of planet Earth?.. Who gives the correct answer to this question - creationists, who, based on Old Testament give our planet only six thousand years, or do modern geologists count it as many as four and a half billion years old?.. How accurate is the geochronological scale and absolute dating methods?..
Analysis of these issues in the light of the data accumulated by modern science leads to the idea of the need to move to a fundamentally new concept of geological history and revise absolutely all available results of stratigraphy, paleontology and geochronology. Within the framework of this concept, the history of the Earth is significantly reduced, although it does not descend to the biblical version.
Note:
Book title"Sensational history of the Earth”given by the publishing house “Veche”. In the author’s version, the book had a much more modest title “How old is planet Earth?..”
From the author
If ten years ago someone had said that I would take up writing this book, I would have at least shrugged my shoulders in surprise, since I was never seriously interested in geology, geophysics, biology, paleontology, and indeed, perhaps, none of the sciences that in one way or another relate to the issues of the formation and development of the Earth specifically as a planet. If I showed any interest in them, it was rather contemplative and curious and was supported only by the desire to be at least superficially familiar with how modern science imagines the world in which we live.
Therefore, it cannot be said that this book was the fruit of any many years of reflection on the topic of the history of the planet Earth, although individual parts included in the material presented below were written up and published as Internet articles even ten years ago, or even more. . The origins go even further into the past - to the very beginning of the 80s of the twentieth century. It was then that I, still a student at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, came across an article in the popular magazine “Knowledge is Power” that examined different models of the development of the Earth. This includes a theory according to which our planet has seriously changed in size over the course of its history.
Yesterday's schoolchild, brought up in the spirit of the Soviet education system, according to which everything discovered in science is an “irrefutable truth” (alas, this ideology still dominates in our society), in addition, already quite familiar with the hypothesis of continental drift and the theory of plate tectonics, and also the theory of the origin and development of planets solar system in the form in which it was presented then (and is still presented) in textbooks, such an idea - the idea of a “growing” Earth - naturally at first seemed like complete nonsense.
In addition, the subjective factor clearly had an impact: after all, we live on the “solid” Earth and do not feel any change in its size. Try to convey to a person who is completely unfamiliar with the heliocentric system and who watches the movement of the Sun across the sky every day that it is the Earth that revolves around the Sun, and not the Sun around the Earth. This will not be so easy, since all his daily experience shows exactly the opposite.
Firstly, the magazine “Knowledge is Power,” despite the popularity of its format, at that time was famous for publishing in an accessible form materials that were called “at the cutting edge of science.”
Secondly, although presented in in brief the theory of the “growing” Earth had its own internal logic and did not contain any obvious contradictions. And this is a fairly clear indicator that the theory may turn out to be correct, no matter how “strange” it may look.
And thirdly, after all, I was no longer a schoolboy, but a student. A student at such an institute, the essence of the training system in which one of our mathematics teachers well formulated in the following figurative form.
A student comes home from school convinced that two and two equal four. Our teachers' job is to make that student question this by the end of the first year; by the end of the third - be sure that this is not so; and by the end of the fifth year - be able to prove that two and two are equal to anything, but not four.
This, of course, is quite exaggerated. But in a condensed form it represents the essence of the concept that there is no “once and for all established truth” in the world. There are only versions, hypotheses and theories. And they may be wrong. Moreover: they are precisely mistaken and, at best, give some getting closer to the truth. Over a certain period of time, this approximation describes reality with a sufficient degree of accuracy. But there inevitably comes a moment when this accuracy ceases to suit us. One theory is replaced by another. And there is nothing “scary” about this. This is a natural process of cognitive development.
There is, say, a classic textbook example in physics - the theory of caloric.
For quite a long time, physicists believed that processes associated with the transfer of heat from one body to another are determined by the presence of such a substance as “caloric.” But over time, the understanding came that the essence of such processes is completely different - in thermal movement molecules. Caloric "died". They refused him. But at the same time, all the laws of thermodynamics that were obtained on the basis of the “erroneous” theory remained...
By the time I read the article about the “growing” Earth, I had already passed the second stage - I was sure that two and two do not equal four. That is, that there are no “absolutely true theories.” But he still couldn’t prove that two and two equal anything but four. Therefore, the theory of the Earth changing its size rather simply amused me. Although it left some small wormhole in the depths of the subconscious...
It just so happened in life that somewhere in the mid-90s I plunged into the topic of ancient legends and traditions, as well as the problem of suppression by modern historical science of facts that contradict the currently accepted picture of the past of humanity, which is drawn and promoted by this science in books and textbooks. With considerable surprise for myself, I discovered that a fairly large layer of information contained in ancient legends and considered by historians to be simple inventions of our distant ancestors, is confirmed in real facts, collected by modern science in a variety of branches of knowledge. And an attempt to combine scientific data and “mythological” information ultimately gives a very detailed and self-consistent picture of the distant past - only a picture that is very far from the one that historians paint for us.
In particular, the well-known plot of ancient legends about the Flood not only finds full confirmation, but also makes it possible to clarify the data accumulated by archaeology, geology, climatology and other sciences. The result that resulted from the “combination of the incompatible,” that is, the mutual intersection of “mythological evidence” and objective scientific data, was published in the form of an online article “The Myth of the Flood: Calculations and Reality,” which was later included as an appendix to my book “Ancient Mexico without crooked mirrors”, published by the Veche publishing house.
In principle, the reality of a cataclysm on a planetary scale under the code name “The Flood” bothers historians first of all. And for geologists who now recognize the possibility of catastrophes on the planet in the past, there is nothing “seditious” about this. The situation was worse with another circumstance that I encountered at the same time.
The fact is that in some ancient legends and traditions (see below) there were descriptions of such processes that could be directly associated with... the hypothesis of a “growing” Earth!
And then, from the depths of my memory, a memory of an article in the magazine “Knowledge is Power” surfaced. Only now it was not just a memory of a curious and amusing theory. Mutual intersection and addition of data from mythology and modern science in the topic about the Flood naturally raised the question - what if there is something here too?!
In order to find the answer to this question, I had to plunge into questions of geology, geophysics, geochemistry, paleoclimatology and paleomagnetism. The result was, without exaggeration, stunning - these mythologies really make it possible not only to clarify the theory of the expanding Earth, but also to significantly advance it!..
The result was an online article “Does the fate of Phaeton await the Earth?..”, which was later included as an appendix to the book “The Inhabited Island of Earth” recently published by the same Veche publishing house.
And here the problem arose. The conclusions of the article were in fundamental contradiction with the currently dominant theory of plate tectonics in geology. Since my interests lay in a completely different area, and it was not my plan to come into conflict with geology, the article for a long time remained rather only as a kind of curious development of an equally curious theory, rather than as an application for something more...
(For those who are interested in the initial articles mentioned above, I can recommend taking a look at the Laboratory’s website Alternative History, where they are posted on the page of my works. For those who are more interested in the substantive essence of the results obtained, I advise them not to waste time on this, since later in the book these results will be presented - and even in a more expanded version)...
The strongest incentive for further progress on the topic of this book was a meeting in the early 2000s with Candidate of Historical Sciences Andrei Zhukov, with whom we became co-authors big project, associated with conducting a whole series of filming and research expeditions to places of ancient cultures and the release of the series documentaries"Forbidden topics in history." Despite a “classical” historical education and even receiving a scientific degree within the official system, Andrei (like me) was not satisfied with the presence of facts that contradict the picture of the past of humanity that is now accepted in historical science. And I was even more dissatisfied with the position of historical science itself in relation to such facts, which were either openly suppressed or declared to be fakes and falsifications without any objective grounds.
Since our positions and approaches here completely coincided, we decided to move further together, using it liberal arts education and my technical as complementary factors. And this mutual complement, as the further course of events showed, turned out to be very fruitful...
Even at our very first meeting, when we shared with each other our views on the problems of our future joint activities, Andrei raised the question of the reliability and correctness of both the dating of specific artifacts and the dating methods themselves, which at that time I somehow even didn't think about it. As a humanist, it was difficult for him to decide on this problem, since the bulk of the methods of so-called absolute dating (that is, determining not the relative, but the absolute age of an object) is based not on humanitarian, but on technical knowledge. And this required effort on my part.
I won’t say that it turned out to be completely simple, but quite quickly it was possible to sort out the problems of dating objects that are relatively young, but make up the bulk of the source material for restoring the history of ancient civilizations. The result was an Internet article with a long title “What do you want, sir?.. Menu of radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology,” which was included as an appendix in the book “Civilization of the Gods” Ancient Egypt", also published by the Veche publishing house.
Being used for dating objects with an age of a maximum of several tens of thousands of years, these methods, if they influenced anything, only influenced the dating of events of the very recent past (when compared with the time scale of the life of the planet as a whole). And although some of these datings are associated with the events of the Great Flood, which had a significant impact on modern look surface of the planet, the errors and shortcomings of these methods do not particularly affect the history of the Earth as a whole.
However, among historical artifacts there are also those that make us think about more significant periods of time and that pose “inconvenient” questions not only for historians, but also for the currently accepted picture of the evolution of the living world as a whole. For example, a collection of clay figurines from the Mexican city of Acambaro contains images of people interacting... with dinosaurs. And there are even more numerous scenes of human interaction with dinosaurs in the Peruvian collection of Ica stones.
Rice. 1. Man riding a dinosaur (Acambaro collection) 
Rice. 2. Human hunting for dinosaurs (Iki collection)
According to modern views On evolution, the most ancient hominids (that is, the ancient ancestors of humans) appeared only a few million years before the current point in time, and dinosaurs went extinct as much as 65 million years ago. The gap between the two events is colossal - the “numbers” differ by an entire order of magnitude. Then where could the stories about human interaction with dinosaurs in the collections of Acambaro figurines and Ica stones come from?..
The size of both collections (tens of thousands of items), as well as the history of their formation, dismisses all suspicions of falsification. In addition, we were able to verify personally that the collections were genuine during the expeditions. But then where is the “error”?.. And what is the “truth”?.. People already lived during the period of dinosaurs, that is, tens of millions of years ago?.. Or did dinosaurs become extinct much later?.. Or are all datings generally incorrect? ..
Of course, even now we can find images of dinosaurs and people - in films, books, children's toys, etc. However, we don’t really live among dinosaurs. Their images reflect only our knowledge of the existence of these ancient animals. In the same way, the collections of clay figurines of Acambaro and Ica stones may well reflect not real events at all, but only ancient people's knowledge of dinosaurs(I adhere to this exact point of view). The only question that remains is where our distant ancestors got such knowledge. But this question already transfers the problem from the plane of evolution of the living world as a whole to the plane of only comparatively recent history humanity.
Everything would be fine, but in addition to the stories in the two collections, there are reports (albeit very scanty) about the discovery of dinosaur bones along with human remains. For example, in South America, where human remains were found even deeper than dinosaur bones. What to do with this?..
Moreover. There is also a whole layer of strange finds - artifacts (that is, artificially created objects) found in coal deposits and other rocks, the age of which is sometimes calculated not even in tens, but in hundreds of millions of years!.. But what to do with this? .
Rice. 3. Hammer in rock dating back over 100 million years Such finds raise the question not only of the correctness of determining their age, but also of the reliability of geological dating methods, and therefore of the reliability of the currently accepted geochronological scale. And this is a huge layer of knowledge accumulated by a variety of sciences. And finding a gap in this knowledge is not so easy. There is no way to solve the problem right away. It was necessary to cling to something.
Archimedes needed a fulcrum in order to turn the Earth upside down. And here it was necessary to turn over not the planet itself, but “only” its history. But for this, too, some kind of fulcrum was needed. And the corresponding lever...
Rice. 4. Monograph “Unknown Hydrogen” (S.V. Digonsky, V.V. Ten)
This lever was the monograph “Unknown Hydrogen,” which was literally “forced on me” by one of its co-authors, Sergei Digonsky, for which I am extremely grateful to him. Having opened the monograph, I could no longer tear myself away from it and, despite the abundance of specific terminology, I literally devoured it, since it made it possible to identify very serious errors in the very principle of constructing a geochronological scale, that is, in the very foundations of the currently accepted picture of the history of our planet. And in addition, the ideas of the monograph significantly complemented and developed the theory of the “growing” Earth. As a result, in 2009, another online article was born with a title that spoke for itself - “The History of the Earth without the Carboniferous Period” (this article was also included as an appendix in the book “The Inhabited Island of Earth”).
All that remained was to take the last step - to decide to plunge into the vast world of basic knowledge of geology, geophysics and paleontology. And three events prompted me to take this step.
Firstly, almost immediately after the publication of an article on the Carboniferous period, Sergei Digonsky sent me materials from some studies in the field of geology, which, although carried out fifty years ago, remained deeply in the shadows because they contradicted accepted concepts. As it turned out, geology also has its “alternatives” who do not agree with the dominant approaches and dogmas in this science.
Secondly, an employee of the Mineralogical Museum. Fersman RAS Leonid Pautov, who helped us in conducting research on some historical artifacts, being an adherent of traditional views in geophysics and geology, tried to “bring me back to the right path,” for which he let me read a book that outlined the history of the formation of modern geological theories. The result turned out to be exactly the opposite - the book made it possible to understand exactly where and why the scientific community made fatal mistakes, and where exactly one should look for the weak points of modern theories.
And thirdly, already during one of the discussions of the collected materials, another person helped me significantly - candidate of physical and mathematical sciences Viktor Panchelyuga, who introduced me to a selection of articles on the latest research in the region of the half-life of radioactive isotopes. An area that now plays a key role in the absolute dating of geological rocks.
The result of all this was the online article “A little about the current situation in geochronology,” which has not yet been published in paper form. It is this article that forms the main core of this book, which includes other mentioned articles, as well as materials used in their preparation, but not previously published for one reason or another.
But before finally moving on to a substantive presentation, I consider it necessary to warn the dear reader that reading the book will require certain mental efforts from him. Although I tried to simplify the text as much as possible, translating into ordinary Russian the numerous specific terminology that experts love to flaunt, but, alas, it was not possible to complete this everywhere. In addition, in order to really understand the material presented, the reader still needs to have some basic knowledge (at least in physics and chemistry).
I express my deepest gratitude to all those who, in one way or another, helped bring this book to life. Not only to those whose names are mentioned above, but also to those whom I did not mention, but who helped in collecting material, in discussing previously published articles and ideas at various stages of their formation.
Special thanks to all those who helped in organizing and financing the expeditions, during which material was also collected for this book.
I dedicate the book to my family and friends: my wife Natasha, my son Maxim, my brother Vladimir and his wife, also Natasha, who are always there and are always ready to help in any matter.
Header photo: Wallpaper @ eskipaper.com
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Often, in science fiction movies on space themes, you can hear: Alpha Centauri is located at a distance of 4500 light years from Earth. Or: we have 200 parsecs left to fly. The question immediately arises: how much is a light year? And is it equal to a parsec?
What is a light year equal to?
According to the IAU (International Astronomical Union) definition, a light year is equal to the distance that a photon of light will travel in a vacuum in one Julian year (which is 365.25 days, in which there are 86,400 SI seconds) when it is not influenced gravitational fields planets.
This definition has been true since 1984. Before this, the calculations used the value of the so-called tropical or solar year. The new value differs from the old one by 0.002%. But, due to the fact that this unit of measurement is not used in high-precision calculations, a difference of 0.002% has no practical significance.
Numerical values of light year measurement
- In meters - 9,460,730,472,580,800 m, or 9.46 petameters.
- In astronomical units - 63,241.1 a.u. A.e. is the average distance between the Sun and Earth.
- In parsecs – 0.306601 rs.
In popular publications it is customary to use related units measurements that show the distance traveled by a photon of light per unit time. One light second is equal to 299,792.458 km.
Knowing the distance between the Earth and the Sun and the Moon, we can calculate that a ray of light reaches the surface of the Moon in 1.3 seconds. An astronomical unit is equal to 500 seconds.