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
  • The stars of the Pleiades are about 444 light-years distant.
    Jamie Carter, Forbes, 6 Jan. 2025
  • 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
  • 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 stars that make up the locks are about 250 light-years away, just down the celestial block from us.
    Mike Lynch, Twin Cities, 25 May 2025
  • The sisters are waving at us from over 400 light-years away.
    Mike Lynch, Twin Cities, 30 Mar. 2025
  • The disks the team studied range from only a few hundred to around 1,000 light-years from Earth.
    Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 30 Apr. 2025
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • What’s your reaction to the news of potential signs of life on a massive planet light-years away?
    Jeremy Engle, New York Times, 25 Apr. 2025
  • 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
  • It’s also considered to be a nearby star at a little over 36 light-years away.
    Mike Lynch, Twin Cities, 13 Apr. 2025
  • 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
  • Virgo contains the Virgo Cluster, a group of galaxies about 54 million light-years from the Milky Way.
    Jamie Carter, Forbes.com, 2 June 2025
  • When staring at twin suns like from much greater distances — many light-years away — astronomers have a much tougher time than young Skywalker in determining two stars from one.
    Robert Lea, Space.com, 3 June 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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