Why is distance in Space measured in lightyears?

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Why is distance in Space measured in lightyears?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

For the same reason we measure distance on Earth in feet/miles/kilometers instead of nanometers. Appropriate scale makes numbers easier to work with. You could say your drive to school is about 15,000,000,000,000 nanometers (roughly 15 quadrillion), but it’s a lot easier to discuss that distance as “about 10 miles”.

Space is *unfathomably enormous*. A light year is a *gigantic* distance (the speed of light multiplied by the time in a year, or the distance light would travel in a year). So light years allow us to give a unit that makes conversation easier and more intuitive (especially since things at astronomical distances start often having temporal effects to consider, since light and causality take time to travel to us).

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