What units are used to measure distance in astronomy? Detailed answer

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What units are used to measure distance in astronomy? Detailed answer

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What units are used to measure distance in astronomy?

Terrestrial distance units are not suitable for measuring the huge distances between celestial objects, so astronomy uses three other basic units of measurement.

Inside the solar system, an "astronomical unit" (AU) is usually used, equal to the average distance from the Earth to the Sun - 149 kilometers. On this measuring scale, Mars is at a distance of 600 astronomical units from the Sun. To estimate interstellar distances, two units of measurement are used: a light year and a parsec.

A light year is equal to the distance that light travels in a year, moving, as you know, at a speed of 300 kilometers per second. It is easy to verify that a light year is approximately 000 billion kilometers. For example, the closest star to the Sun (Proxima Centauri) is located at a distance of about 9460 light years from us.

Professional astronomers often use the parsec instead of the light year. A parsec is defined as the distance from which the radius of the earth's orbit is seen at an angle of one second of arc. This is a very small angle: at this angle, a one-kopeck coin is visible from a distance of three kilometers. One parsec (pc) is about 3,26 light years, or about 30 trillion kilometers.

Multiple units of measurement - kiloparsec (Kpc), equal to 1000 parsecs, and megaparsec (Mpc), equal to 1 million parsecs - are used to estimate distances to extragalactic objects. The Andromeda Galaxy is about 2,2 million light-years away, or 675 kiloparsecs.

Author: Kondrashov A.P.

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