Adem lives and works on a trading ship, and thus spends a lot of time in space, where relativity means months in space is years on planets. During one planetside trip, he "buys" himself a wife from a couple who just got pregnant. In exchange for a bride, his family pays for gene therapy and ensures the baby has a good life and good education, and pulls the family up out of grinding poverty. Hisako is Adem's future bride, and we follow both her as she grows up and Adem as he spends months in space coming to grips with the idea of being married soon. I didn’t ask about him. Questions of that sort were not encouraged. To Mom, the past was something you sped by—and best to do it at ten miles over the speed limit, in a brand-new white Cadillac. How much is that? The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second, or 299,792.5 kilometers per second. That's 670.6 million mph (170.9 million km/h). In comparison, the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years, or 24.7 trillion miles (39.8 trillion km). The Universe within 12.5 Light Years - The Nearest stars". www.atlasoftheuniverse.com . Retrieved 2 April 2022.

See? The very faint Proxima Centauri, which is gravitationally bound to Alpha Centauri, is indicated by a red circle in this image. Proxima Centauri, is our sun’s nearest neighbor among the stars. A beam of light from this star takes about 4 years to travel to Earth. The two bright stars are Alpha Centauri and Beta Centauri. Image via Skatebiker / Wikimedia Commons ( CC BY-SA 3.0). Familiar space objects, conceptualized If you want to know the distance of a light year in kilometers, you will need to find the speed of light in kilometers per second. If you want miles, you will need the speed of light in miles per second. Earth is about eight light minutes from the Sun. A trip at light-speed to the very edge of our solar system – the farthest reaches of the Oort Cloud, a collection of dormant comets way, way out there – would take about 1.87 years. Keep going to Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighboring star, and plan on arriving in 4.25 years at light speed.My brothers are endearingly bad actors—I’m proud of them for remembering their lines. In the half-light of the basement, I watch them grimace and grin.

Just in from golf, she wore white culottes and a buttercup visor. Before she even got off her sunglasses, I screamed, “Mom, Mom, look—flowers for you!” Measuring in distances that are easy for humans to understand would be impractical and almost impossible when dealing with the distances between stars, solar systems and galaxies. For example, the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is about 27,000 light-years away. The nearest galactic neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, is 2.5 million light-years away. Breaking down the light-year Keep reading, for a way to comprehend the vastness of the universe, using units of distance we know and use every day. Let’s start with astronomical unitsI think the character work was pretty decent; I got a good idea of who Hisako was as she grew up. While some aspects of her characterization felt shallow, I liked seeing her grow. Adem not as much, but I enjoyed seeing how his family and ship life worked. The Great Attractor lies at a distance of somewhere between 150 and 250million light-years (the latter being the most recent estimate). She helps us to do the necessary thing – open our eyes and our hearts' – Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall What’s fresh and interesting about The Light Years is its account of gay survivalism—what it’s like to be rejected or adrift from others’ custody; coupling occasionally; at least once in love; and often in profound solitude in the natural world . . . The Light Years is less a queering of the wilderness than a wilding of queerness . . . In the tradition of Henry Adams, Richard Rodriguez, Michelle Tea, the book arrives at its genre: an education." —Brian Blanchfield, The New York Times Book Review