Light Year

Date: 08/09/97 at 10:44:36
From: amanda
Subject: Space

How long (in miles) is a light year?

I tried figuring out how to do this but I have no idea where to start.

Date: 08/09/97 at 11:42:59
From: Doctor Anthony
Subject: Re: Space

Light travels approximately 186,000 miles per second, so to get the 
number of miles in a light year we must multiply by the number of 
seconds in a year.  I shall take the year to be 365.25 days

              miles/sec  days    hrs  min  sec

 Light year = 186,000 x 365.25 x 24 x 60 x 60

            = 5.8697136 x 10^12  miles

 i.e. 5.87 million million miles.

-Doctor Anthony,  The Math Forum
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