The Convention of Meter, concluded in France in 1875, established a single-unit system to be shared and comparable on the international level. A base unit of length, defined as the length of the path travelled by light through absolute vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. The word “light-year” clumps together the countless stories of our imagination and the never-ending fascination of scholars. Even tomorrow, we may find contrasting results or new discoveries. The cosmos itself is continually growing and waning. Nor can we fathom the density of the external galaxies that are scattered about outer space,ĭescribed by I.Asimov in an immensely fitting metaphor: “A single particle of sand in a large 32 km by 32 km room.”Īlthough various scholars have been speculating and studying the universe for ages and defining it though measurement, We cannot, for example, easily imagine the speed of light. Still, we find it difficult to grasp their actual distance and size, since the universe is just too extensive. In a single view, we are able to see light released at various moments, hundreds, or tens of thousands of years ago, without being the least concerned with the distance of each star.īecause of the power of the constant and fastest entity, light, we can amuse ourselves by connecting the random arrays of the stars we see and attributing to them stories and relational meaning. The night sky full of stars that we see is actually an aggregation of light released from stars of differing ages in the distant past. The distance that light travels through free space in one year (approximately 9.46 trillion km)
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