NASA explains how far light from the Sun will travel throughout 2024

The vastness of space is quite difficult to imagine, especially considering the general measurement used to measure distances between objects is light years, but what does that actually mean? And how would light travel throughout an entire year? What is a light year? To understand this, we must first know what light time is the distance light travels within a specific period of time.

In just one light second, a photon of light has traveled 186,000 miles or 300,000 kilometers. In one light minute, light travels 11,160,000 miles, and one light hour is 671 million miles. With these measurements, we can understand that it takes 8.2 minutes for light from the Sun to reach Earth and 43.2 minutes for it to reach Jupiter.

But what about an entire day? Light from the Sun will travel 16.1 billion miles over the course of a day, reaching far beyond the Kuiper Belt and 29 light days to the inner wall of the Oort Cloud, a collection of dormant comets that would take light 1.87 years to reach. Light from the Sun will travel 5.8 trillion miles over the course of one year, and the closest star and exoplanet are Proxima Centauri & Proxima B, located 4.25 light years from Earth..