I realise I’ve recently taken for granted how long a Light Year is; flippantly using it as a unit of measure.  I just happened to be reading about the Ring Nebula sitting 4,000 Light Years away from Earth.  The first thing that crossed my mind was the 4,000 part, which on it’s own sounds big, but when you consider you’re talking in Light Years then that puts things in a different perspective.

Light Years, the distance light can travel in an Earth year; when you sit and think about it, that’s massive! 

Light travels at roughly 300,000 Km in a second.  The average circumference of Earth is about 40,000Km.  So, in one second, light can travel 7.5 times round Earth; for those reading this from the UK it could do John o’Groats to Land’s End (as the crow flies) in about 0.03 seconds.  Now scale that thinking from seconds into years.  There are about 31.5 Million seconds in a year = 236 Million times round Earth.  Now multiply that by 4000 to get you to the Ring Nebula; mind blowing!

I know we have to quantify such vast distances in a way we can easily handle them, but every so often just stop and think about how big a Light Year is.

Until the next post… Clear Skies!

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