Light-year

From Traveller Wiki - Science-Fiction Adventure in the Far future
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Wiki Navy.png

A Light-year or lightyear is a unit of measurement of length.

Description (Specifications)

A light-year is specifically the distance light travels in a vacuum over a period of one year.

  • The common abbreviation is ly.

One (Solomani) light-year is equal to:

  1. About 9,460,730,472,580 meters
  2. About 63,240 astronomical units
  3. About 0.3066 parsecs

It is based on the Terran year of 365.25 days

One (Imperial) light-year is equal to:

  1. About 9,424,275,489,368 meters
  2. About 63,197 astronomical units
  3. About 0.3064 parsecs

It is based on standard Imperial year of 365 days

Following the Solomani Rim War, the Imperium began to move away from Terranocentric metrics, instead adopting a set of universal scales and measures not specifically based on the physical parameters of the primary star system of an enemy state[1].

History & Background (Dossier)

The exact length of the light-year depends on the length of the reference year used in the calculation.

  • Within the Imperium, an Imperial standard year of 365.00 Imperial standard days is used.
  • The light-year is often used to measure distances between stars.
  • The preferred unit of measurement for such distances is the parsec.

References & Contributors (Sources)

This list of sources was used by the Traveller Wiki Editorial Team and individual contributors to compose this article. Copyrighted material is used under license from Mongoose Publishing or by permission of the author. The page history lists all of the contributions.
  1. Information provided to the library by Marc Miller relating to the Parsec