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, 6 Jan. 2025
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The stars of the Pleiades are about 444 light-years distant.
—Jamie Carter, Forbes, 14 Oct. 2024
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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 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
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About the size of Saturn, the new world is circling a red dwarf star about 111 light-years away.
—Alex Knapp, Forbes.com, 27 June 2025
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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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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
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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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This is relatively close to Earth, just 444 light-years away.
—ArsTechnica, 8 July 2025
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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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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
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Creating the image The Sculptor galaxy lies 11 million light-years from the Milky Way.
—Adam Leroy, The Conversation, 15 July 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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Her focus on exercise is light-years away from where Jones, 66, of Aurora, Illinois, was just a few years ago.
—Erika Edwards, NBC news, 28 July 2025
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That leaves them light-years ahead of the Rays, who share Florida with the Miami Marlins, another team with attendance woes.
—Dan Schlossberg, Forbes.com, 19 July 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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