How to Use light-year in a Sentence
light-year
noun-
At 444 light-years away, the Pleiades is one of the closest star clusters to Earth.
—Samuel Sanders, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 July 2024
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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
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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
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This stellar nursery is about 450 light-years away from Earth.
—Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 11 Apr. 2024
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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
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Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, is 25 light-years from Earth.
—Phil Plait, Scientific American, 14 July 2023
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This one is 100 light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices.
—CBS News, 30 Nov. 2023
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The Whirlpool Galaxy lies about 27 million light-years away and contains hundreds of billions of stars.
—Dean Regas, The Enquirer, 8 Sep. 2023
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These two galaxies are more than 2 million light-years away.
—Mike Lynch, Twin Cities, 21 Jan. 2024
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What turned out to be hard for Venus will only be harder for exoplanets many light-years away.
—Elise Cutts, WIRED, 7 Apr. 2024
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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
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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
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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
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Andria seemed to live light-years away from my Washington, D.C. apartment.
—Chris Klimek, Smithsonian Magazine, 30 Nov. 2023
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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
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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
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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
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This is a massive, super-active star-forming region that spans more than 1,600 light-years.
—Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 25 Jan. 2024
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John was light-years away from my stuffy East Coast upbringing and liberal-arts college friends.
—Meta Valentic, Los Angeles Times, 29 Dec. 2023
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Some 3,800 light-years away from Earth, in the Southern Hemisphere constellation Norma, lies a massive cloud of gas and dust.
—Christian Thorsberg, Smithsonian Magazine, 18 Apr. 2024
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The map, painted in infrared wavelengths, reveals new details in a stretch of our galactic home 500 light-years wide.
—Dennis Overbye, New York Times, 19 Apr. 2024
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To reach us, a burst from outside the Milky Way must traverse millions or billions of light-years of the near-empty space between galaxies.
—Rahul Rao, Popular Science, 19 Oct. 2023
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The second candidate is much farther away—about 3.2 billion light-years—and is earlier in the merging process.
—Meghan Bartels, Scientific American, 3 Mar. 2023
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The gargantuan black hole, which is said to have the mass of 30 billion suns, is located at the center of a galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years from Earth.
—Ariana Garcia, Chron, 2 Apr. 2023
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This feature measures about 20 light-years across, or more than six times the diameter of our Solar System.
—Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 16 Jan. 2024
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Background stars and galaxies populate the field of view and peek through the nebula of gas and dust that has been ejected from the aging massive star to span 10 light-years across space.
—Alan Taylor, The Atlantic, 12 July 2023
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Nearby will be orangey Aldebaran, the brightest star in the constellation of Taurus and about 65 light-years from the solar system.
—Jamie Carter, Forbes, 29 Feb. 2024
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On thousands of sterile exoplanets, throughout all the vast sphere of stars within a hundred light-years of the sun, life was about to blossom—life, or something else.
—Karl Schroeder, IEEE Spectrum, 24 Feb. 2024
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Some respond with indifference to a cataclysm that’s still light-years away.
—Inkoo Kang, The New Yorker, 18 Mar. 2024
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The James Webb Space Telescope recently spotted evidence that a planet over 48 light-years away is home to a liquid water ocean.
—Michael Kan, PCMAG, 9 July 2024
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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