If a ray of light travels at 186,000 miles per sec, how much distance is described by a light year?
117381
Roughly 5.87 trillion miles
263654
The speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 m/s.\nThe meter is defined in terms of the distance which light travels in a certain amount of time, that is how we know the EXACT speed of light....we defined it as so.
1183829
It isn't measured, it is calculated. The speed of light in miles per second is multiplied by the number of seconds in a year to get the length of a light year in miles. \n\nMeasuring the speed of light can be done in many ways, and is not as hard to do as it was before electronics were invented. Early methods relied on flashes of light from rotating mirrors miles apart. Today laser pulses are timed very accurately with electronics over short distances. Also, amazingly, Maxwell's equations calculate the speed of light theoretically from a number of other unrelated electric and magnetic measurements.\n\nMeasuring the distance to remote stars is another topic, but the results are usually expressed in light years because the numbers are just inconveniently large when expressed in miles.
1160139
theoretically nothing can travel faster than light which is 186,000 miles/sec, but i don't agree with that theory at all
637913
A light-year is defined as the distance that light can travel in 1 year. We can calculate this by multiplying the speed of light by 1 year (or 3.1557*10^7 seconds) to find the distance: \n\nd = c*t\n=(2.9979*10^8 m/s)*(3.1557*10^7 s)\n=9.4605*10^15 meters\nor ~9,500,000,000,000 kilometers\nor ~5,900,000,000,000 miles\nor ~63,279 au\n \n\nSo it's 9,500,000,000,000,000 meters
666698
The speed of light in a vacuum is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second (or 1,079,252,848.8  kilometres per hour, which is approximately 186,282.397 miles per second, or 670,616,629.4 miles per hour). \nThe speed of sound c (from Latin celeritas, "velocity") varies depending on the medium through which the sound waves pass.
551177
If light travels 186,000 miles per second, then how far in 60 seconds (1 minute), how far in 60 minutes (1 hour), how far is that in 24 hours (1 day), how far is that in 365.25 days (one year, allowing for a leap year).  Crunch the numbers.
44713
The light-year is a measure of distance, not time. It is the total distance that a beam of light, moving in a straight line, travels in one year.
587733
Light travels at 186,282 miles per second.  So multiply by 60 (seconds per minute) by 60 (minutes per hour) by 24 (hours per day) by 365 (days per year), which gives 5,874,589,152,000 miles for 1 light year.\n4.2 light years works out to 24,673,274,438,400 miles.  Quite a long walk :) \nHere's a way of illustrating this:\nIt takes light 1.27 seconds to travel the 238,000 miles from the Earth to the Moon.  If this distance is represented by 1.27 inches, then an object one light year away would be 636 miles away, and a star 4.2 light years distant would be 2,670 miles away - about 200 miles more than from New York to Los Angeles!
194179
The distance from the earth to the sun is about 93 million miles. The speed of light is about 186,000 miles per second. Dividing shows that it tkes light about 500 seconds to go from the sun to the earth. That's 8 minutes 20 seconds.
616855
The sun is approx 98 million miles away, light travels 186,282.397 miles per second. So we would know ( and die) about 8.768 minutes later
53714
Speed of light is 186,282 miles per second\nSpeed of sound is a much slower 761 miles per hour at sea level, although that reduces in higher atmosphere, coming in around just 660 mph at 20,000 feet.
45682
I love this question. The best way to do conversions is to simply type them into Google like this:\n\n25 light-years in miles\n\nWhich gives roughly 147 trillion miles. See how easy it is? This is a great Google tip.\n\nYou could enter this on your calculator as 147 EE 12\n\nIn metric 25 light-years is roughly 237 petameters (237 Pm) which is about the distance to the Star Fomalhaut in the constellation of the Southern Fish.\n\nBy comparison our Milky Way Galaxy is hundreds of billions of stars in a disc about 100,000 light-years across.
19452
"A light year is the distance light travels in one year: about 9.461 × 10^15 metres or about 5.879 × 10^12 miles."\n\nFor some context, it is 4.22 light years to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star outside the solar system.
488777
A light year is a measurement of distance, not time.  It's the distance light travels in a year.  For example it takes light about 8 minutes to get from the Sun to the Earth.  Alpha Centauri (the next nearest star) is 4 light years away.\n\nA light year is 9.4605284 × 10^15 meters (10^15 means 10 to the 15th power).  Basically, it's REALLY far and only good for measuring huge distances in space.
495659
The accurate speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s.
241158
The light from the sun goes about 186,000 miles in a second in a vacuum, which is a bit more than nine circuits of the earth.\n\n- - - -  - - - - - \n\nkirchwey caught me in another error:\n\nI did not previously bother to look up the circumference of the earth, but just winged it. Unfortunately, I misremembered/underestimated the earth's circumference by about 25%. \n\nThe circumference of the earth at the equator is about 24,901.55 miles. The speed of light in a vacuum is roughtly 186,282.397 miles per second, so the distance light travels in one second is equivalent to 7.480755 circuits around the earth at ground level at the equator, ignoring mountains and other orographic features.