![]() Light travels at around 300,000 kilometres per second, so these numbers can get very big, very fast. Since the speed of light is constant, the distance is also constant. A light year is defined as the distance light travels in a year. If you want to convert AU to KM or Miles, simply multiply the Earth's orbital radius by the AU value.įor distances outside of the solar system, the light-year distance is often used. These values are much easier to work with. Earth is 1AU, Venus at 0.72AU, and Jupiter at 5.2AU. You can see why we don't express this as kilometres! For objects in the solar system, their orbits are typically given in terms of the Astronomical Unit (AU). Elliptical Orbits - Aphelion, Perihelion, Perigee, Apogeeĭue to this variation, the Astronomical Unit is now defined as exactly 149,597,870,700 metres (about 150 million kilometres, or 93 million miles). We say average because the Earth's orbit is elliptical, varying from a maximum (aphelion) to a minimum (perihelion) and back again once a year. The Astronomical Unit is the average distance from Earth to the Sun. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. In modern astronomy, we often use the Astronomical Unit or the Lightyear. When we realised just how big space was, we needed some new units. ![]() ![]() Far too many to describe them in terms of miles or kilometres. When we talk about distance in astronomy, we are usually talking very, very large numbers. ![]() A look at the ways which astronomers measure distance in space covering parallax, distance modulus, variable stars, supernova and redshifts. ![]()
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