News tagged with light years
Do black holes help stars form?
(PhysOrg.com) -- The center of just about every galaxy is thought to host a black hole, some with masses of thousands of millions of Suns and consequently strong gravitational pulls that disrupt material around ...
Feb 03, 2012 |
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Gaseous ring around young star raises questions
(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have detected a mysterious ring of carbon monoxide gas around the young star V1052 Cen, which is about 700 light years away in the southern constellation Centaurus. The ring is ...
Jan 19, 2012 |
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Re-thinking an alien world
Forty light years from Earth, a rocky world named "55 Cancri e" circles perilously close to a stellar inferno. Completing one orbit in only 18 hours, the alien planet is 26 times closer to its parent star than Mercury ...
Jan 16, 2012 |
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Discovery of three smallest exoplanets: The Barnard's star connection
The discovery of the three smallest planets yet orbiting a distant star, which was announced today at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society, has an unusual connection to Barnard's star, one ...
Jan 11, 2012 |
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When galaxy clusters collide
A UC Davis graduate student who is leading a study of the collision of galaxy clusters 5 billion light years away will discuss the team's findings today, Jan. 10, in a press briefing at the annual meeting of the American ...
Jan 10, 2012 |
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In glowing, swirling dust, new stars are born
(PhysOrg.com) -- An image taken by UA astrophotographer Adam Block, chosen by NASA as Astronomy Picture of the Day, brings us the best yet glimpse into a stellar nursery about 450 light years away from Earth.
Dec 09, 2011 |
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Astronomers discover biggest black holes ever (Update)
University of California, Berkeley, astronomers have discovered the largest black holes to date two monsters with masses equivalent to 10 billion suns that are threatening to consume anything, even light, ...
Dec 05, 2011 |
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Review: Why I bought an iPhone 4S
(AP) -- I felt nervous and a little giddy sidling up to the counter at the Apple Store on the first day the new iPhone went on sale last month.
Electronics / Consumer & Gadgets
Nov 02, 2011 |
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'Pacman' nebula gets some teeth
(PhysOrg.com) -- To visible-light telescopes, this star-forming cloud appears to be chomping through the cosmos, earning it the nickname the "Pacman" nebula, like the famous Pac-Man video game that debuted ...
Oct 27, 2011 |
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Close encounters of the galactic kind
(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have used a large survey to test a prediction that close encounters between galaxies can trigger the rapid growth of supermassive black holes. Key to this work was Chandra's unique ...
Oct 26, 2011 |
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Space image: Carina Nebula: 14,000+ Stars
(PhysOrg.com) -- The Carina Nebula is a star-forming region in the Sagittarius-Carina arm of the Milky Way that is 7,500 light years from Earth and the Chandra X-Ray Observatory has detected more than 14,000 ...
Oct 17, 2011 |
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'Dark energy' targeted in European space mission
So-called dark energy, believed to play a role in the accelerated expansion of the Universe, will be studied in a major science mission to be launched later this decade, the European Space Agency (ESA) said ...
Oct 04, 2011 |
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Gravitational waves that are 'sounds of the universe'
Einstein wrote about them, and we're still looking for them -- gravitational waves, which are small ripples in the fabric of space-time, that many consider to be the sounds of our universe.
Oct 03, 2011 |
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'Pacman Nebula' lives the high life
(PhysOrg.com) -- High-mass stars are important because they are responsible for much of the energy pumped into our galaxy over its lifetime.
Sep 29, 2011 |
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Living in the galactic danger zone
We know for certain that life exists in the Milky Way galaxy: that life is us. Scientists are continually looking to understand more about how life on our planet came to be and the conditions that must be ...
Sep 23, 2011 |
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Light-year
A light-year or light year (symbol: ly) is a unit of length, equal to just under 1013 kilometres. As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year.
The light-year is often used to measure distances to stars and other distances on a galactic scale, especially in non-specialist and popular science publications. The preferred unit in astrometry is the parsec, because it can be more easily derived from, and compared with, observational data. The parsec is defined as the distance at which an object will appear to move one arcsecond of parallax when the observer moves one astronomical unit perpendicular to the line of sight to the observer, and is equal to approximately 3.26 light-years.
The related unit of the light-month, roughly one-twelfth of a light-year, is also used occasionally for approximate measures.
For more information about Light-year, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
This text uses material from Wikipedia and is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.
