Light Years

A light year is a unit of distance used in astronomy to measure how far light travels in one year in a vacuum. Specifically, a light year is the distance that light, which travels at a speed of approximately 299,792 kilometers per second (or about 186,282 miles per second), covers in one year. This distance is approximately 9.46 trillion kilometers (or about 5.88 trillion miles). Light years are commonly used to express astronomical distances between stars and galaxies, providing a more comprehensible scale for the vast distances involved in the universe.