StarDogs Astronomy
A question I get a lot is, "How far away is the North Star?"
Our North Star has a name, it's Polaris, and if you look up Polaris online, you'll get it's distance in Light Years. A light year is the distance of how far light travels in one year, 5.88 trillion miles. That is a number that is so difficult to wrap one's brain around, so science uses light years to make things manageable as far as numbers go. I however, am a numbers guy so I've done the math for you on the distances to over 100 of the stars we see in the night sky as well as a number of other objects and have them on a chart. So back to Polaris:
Polaris distance from Earth is listed as 431.2328 light years. Well, that's all good and dandy, but how far is that? In Miles, that distance comes to 2,535,648,864,000,000 (2 quadrillion, 535 trillion, 648 billion, 864 million) miles. In Kilometers, 4,079,893,520,800,000 (4 quadrillion, 79 trillion, 893 billion, 520 million, 800 thousand) kilometers.
Now you know why the measurement of Light Years is used.
If you want to know how far other stars are, let me know, I'll do my best to find it for you.
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