Psalm 8:3 When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, 4 What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him?
A light-year (symbol: ly), sometimes written light year, lightyear, or Light-year is an astronomical unit of length (not time) equal to just under 9.5 trillion kilometres (or about 6 trillion miles) [One trillion here is taken to be 1012 (one million million)]. As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in vacuum in one Julian year. The light-year is most often used when expressing distances to stars and other distances on a galactic scale, especially in non-specialist and popular science publications. The unit usually used in professional astrometry is the parsec (symbol: pc, approximately 3.26 light-years; the distance at which one Astronomical Unit subtends an angle of one second of arc).
1 light-year = 9460730472580800 metres (exactly)
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- ≈ 5.878625 trillion miles
- ≈ 63241.077 astronomical units
- ≈ 0.306601 parsecs
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When astronomers use their telescopes to look at stars, things are different. The distances are gigantic. For example, the closest star to Earth (besides our sun) is something like 24,000,000,000,000 miles (38,000,000,000,000 kilometers) away. That’s the closest star. There are stars that are billions of times farther away than that. When you start talking about those kinds of distances, a mile or kilometer just isn’t a practical unit to use because the numbers get too big. No one wants to write or talk about numbers that have 20 digits in them!
So to measure really long distances, people use a unit called a light year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Therefore, a light second is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers). A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year, or:
186,000 miles/second * 60 seconds/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = 5,865,696,000,000 miles/year
A light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles (9,460,800,000,000 kilometers). That’s a long way!
Gen 1:16 Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night. He made the stars also.
Gen 15:5 Then He brought him outside and said, “Look now toward heaven, and count the stars if you are able to number them.” And He said to him, “So shall your descendants be.”
Job 7:17 “What is man, that You should exalt him, that You should set Your heart on him
Psalm 147:4 He counts the number of the stars; He calls them all by name.
Jeremiah 32:27 “Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for Me?
Daniel 12:3 Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the firmament, and those who turn many to righteousness Like the stars forever and ever.
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