How to Use light-year in a Sentence
light-year
noun-
The stars of the Pleiades are about 444 light-years distant.
—Jamie Carter, Forbes, 14 Oct. 2024
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The stars of the Pleiades are about 444 light-years distant.
—Jamie Carter, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2025
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This blue-white star 77 light-years from our sun is one of the brightest in the April sky.
—Jamie Carter, Forbes.com, 7 Apr. 2025
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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 sisters are waving at us from over 400 light-years away.
—Mike Lynch, Twin Cities, 30 Mar. 2025
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Barnard’s Star is small—about 15 percent the mass of our sun—and only around six light-years away.
—Rudy Molinek, Smithsonian Magazine, 20 Mar. 2025
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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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The third category only gets out to four light-years, which isn’t even as far as the closest star to the sun.
—Phil Plait, Scientific American, 27 Feb. 2025
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The third category only gets out to four light-years, which isn’t even as far as the closest star to the sun.
—Phil Plait, Scientific American, 27 Feb. 2025
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Both are great and light-years better than rubber bands or a Ziploc.
—Jen Murphy, Outside Online, 21 Oct. 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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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
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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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The team traced the repeating fast radio burst to the edge of an 11.3 billion-year-old galaxy 2 billion light-years from Earth.
—Ashley Strickland, CNN, 24 Jan. 2025
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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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It was thought that 16 million light-years was around the upper limit possible for these jets.
—New Atlas, 19 Sep. 2024
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It’s also considered to be a nearby star at a little over 36 light-years away.
—Mike Lynch, Twin Cities, 13 Apr. 2025
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This nebula is just about 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus.
—Samuel Sanders, Smithsonian Magazine, 13 Sep. 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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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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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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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
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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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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
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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
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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