![]() Don’t get me wrong, I like math and physics, but we’re not that close, if you know what I’m sayin’. See the angry looking cartoon eyes in the picture above? THAT’s how much I hate having to use gigantic numbers. My head just exploded trying to visualize those numbers. That’s roughly 9.5 trillion kilometers, or 6 trillion miles. Otherwise we’d end up with big numbers again, and that’s migraine-inducing for everyone.Ī light-year is the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in a year. Much more practical for measuring interstellar distances. Light-years (ly)Ī lot bigger than AUs, are light-years. It’s easiest to imagine the position of a planet, asteroid belt or space-ship in a star system if you can compare it to that between Earth and the sun. *ouch*ĪUs are usually used to measure distances within a planetary system. Originally, one AU was defined as the length of the semi-major axis of Earth’s orbit, but for simplification purposes (tongue-in-cheek), a bunch of astrophysicists and mathematicians decided Earth’s orbit isn’t ‘perfect’ enough so they replaced our planet with a particle with infinitesimal mass and thus near to zero perturbations in its perfect elliptical orbit, and calculated the average distance between it and the Sun. The Earth revolves around the sun in an elliptical orbit, which means it’s sometimes closer, sometimes farther away from the sun. And isn’t it obvious we’d take our own planet as a point of reference to measure the galaxy, since it’s by far the most important flying rock out there? What? It is. There are three units of measurement that are predominately used in astronomy, and thus also in science-fiction: Astronomical units (AU)Īn astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the sun. It’s so damn big, in fact, that any relatively decent distance surpasses the capacities of our usual Earthling measurement units.
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