How to Use light-year in a Sentence

light-year

noun
Definition of light-yearnext
Synonyms for light-yearnext
  • The stars of the Pleiades are about 444 light-years distant.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 14 Oct. 2024
  • The stars of the Pleiades are about 444 light-years distant.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2025
  • At 444 light-years away, the Pleiades is one of the closest star clusters to Earth.
    — Samuel Sanders, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 July 2024
  • Of course, the hard part is trying to spot clear signs of life from more than 1,000 light-years away.
    — WIRED, 2 Oct. 2023
  • The Beehive cluster is about 557 light-years away from Earth and is home to at least two planets.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 31 May 2023
  • This stellar nursery is about 450 light-years away from Earth.
    — Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 11 Apr. 2024
  • Both are great and light-years better than rubber bands or a Ziploc.
    — Jen Murphy, Outside Online, 21 Oct. 2024
  • About 1,000 light-years away, a vast disk of gas and dust is offering astronomers a peek at how planets are born.
    — Riley Black, Smithsonian Magazine, 10 June 2024
  • Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, is 25 light-years from Earth.
    — Phil Plait, Scientific American, 14 July 2023
  • The evidence is 200 ancient stars in the Milky Way’s halo, the most distant of which is more than a million light-years from Earth.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 23 Nov. 2024
  • This one is 100 light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices.
    — CBS News, 30 Nov. 2023
  • The Whirlpool Galaxy lies about 27 million light-years away and contains hundreds of billions of stars.
    — Dean Regas, The Enquirer, 8 Sep. 2023
  • These two galaxies are more than 2 million light-years away.
    — Mike Lynch, Twin Cities, 21 Jan. 2024
  • It was thought that 16 million light-years was around the upper limit possible for these jets.
    — New Atlas, 19 Sep. 2024
  • This nebula is just about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus.
    — Samuel Sanders, Smithsonian Magazine, 13 Sep. 2024
  • What turned out to be hard for Venus will only be harder for exoplanets many light-years away.
    — Elise Cutts, Quanta Magazine, 19 Mar. 2024
  • What turned out to be hard for Venus will only be harder for exoplanets many light-years away.
    — Elise Cutts, WIRED, 7 Apr. 2024
  • About 57 light-years away, four planets orbit a sunlike star that is 10 billion years old — twice as old as the sun, and already in the advanced stages of its life.
    — Quanta Magazine, 20 Dec. 2023
  • That’s not a mistake – the lighter galaxy at the upper-left of the image is actually more than 200 million light-years closer to Earth than the rest of the group.
    — Michael Irving, New Atlas, 24 Nov. 2024
  • Over the next six years, the powerful space telescope will peer as far as ten billion light-years across the cosmos, constructing the largest 3D map of the universe to date.
    — Christian Thorsberg, Smithsonian Magazine, 24 May 2024
  • Andria seemed to live light-years away from my Washington, D.C. apartment.
    — Chris Klimek, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Nov. 2023
  • Just six light-years from the solar system — in cosmic terms, our backyard — exists a world about half the size of Venus that’s 125 °C on the surface and where a year lasts three Earth days.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 1 Oct. 2024
  • The images show the surface of the star R. Doradus, a red giant star 180 light-years away in the Dorado constellation.
    — Ashley Strickland, CNN, 11 Sep. 2024
  • Appearing like a pair of red eyes in the darkness of space, the two galaxies are located millions of light-years away from Earth.
    — Marco Rubio, Newsweek, 2 Nov. 2024
  • Some voids span hundreds of millions of light-years, and together, these bubbles make up at least 80% of the universe’s volume.
    — Lyndie Chiou, Quanta Magazine, 25 July 2023
  • At just 39 light-years distant, Trappist-1 is also close enough for astronomers to study using space telescopes.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes, 16 Dec. 2024
  • The Pillars of Creation is a small region within the vast Eagle Nebula, which lies 6,500 light-years away.
    — Alan Taylor, The Atlantic, 12 July 2023
  • Those include young star-forming regions and older star clusters as small as just 10 light-years across.
    — Julia Musto, Fox News, 10 Aug. 2023
  • This is a massive, super-active star-forming region that spans more than 1,600 light-years.
    — Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 25 Jan. 2024
  • But for galaxies billions of light-years away, the stars appear blended together due to the distance.
    — Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 6 Jan. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'light-year.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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