as in worlds
a huge physical or conceptual distance
my sister and I are close in age, but personality-wise, there are light-years between us
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Recent Examples of light-years
Just this year another team of scientists used Gaia data to look at 17,000 young stars—which tend to form right in the middle of the galaxy’s disk—and 3,400 Cepheid variables in a region of the Milky Way tens of thousands of light-years across.
—
Phil Plait, Scientific American, 6 Nov. 2025
Water bodies light-years away hold volumes of water trillions of times greater than Earth’s oceans.
—Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 5 Nov. 2025
From the perspective of a stationary observer on Earth, the nearest singlet Sun-like star is Tau Ceti, about 12 light-years away.
—Big Think, 5 Nov. 2025
Discovered using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), the flare erupted from the supermassive black hole at the heart of an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) designated J2245+3743 and located in the center of a galaxy 10 billion light-years away from Earth.
—Robert Lea, Space.com, 4 Nov. 2025
The black hole flare, as the phenomenon is known, is thought to be the biggest and most distant ever recorded — it was detected from 10 billion light-years away.
—Denise Chow, NBC news, 4 Nov. 2025
Located about 162 light-years away from Earth, β CMi is encompassed by a disk of hydrogen moving incredibly fast.
—Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 22 Oct. 2025
However, while real stars are massive, glowing balls of gas located light-years away from Earth, meteors are usually just tiny bits of rock or dust—often no bigger than a grain of sand—that come from comets or asteroids.
—Hannah Parry, MSNBC Newsweek, 21 Oct. 2025
Phil Plait, Scientific American, 6 Nov. 2025
Water bodies light-years away hold volumes of water trillions of times greater than Earth’s oceans.
—Kaif Shaikh, Interesting Engineering, 5 Nov. 2025
From the perspective of a stationary observer on Earth, the nearest singlet Sun-like star is Tau Ceti, about 12 light-years away.
—Big Think, 5 Nov. 2025
Discovered using the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), the flare erupted from the supermassive black hole at the heart of an Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) designated J2245+3743 and located in the center of a galaxy 10 billion light-years away from Earth.
—Robert Lea, Space.com, 4 Nov. 2025
The black hole flare, as the phenomenon is known, is thought to be the biggest and most distant ever recorded — it was detected from 10 billion light-years away.
—Denise Chow, NBC news, 4 Nov. 2025
Located about 162 light-years away from Earth, β CMi is encompassed by a disk of hydrogen moving incredibly fast.
—Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 22 Oct. 2025
However, while real stars are massive, glowing balls of gas located light-years away from Earth, meteors are usually just tiny bits of rock or dust—often no bigger than a grain of sand—that come from comets or asteroids.
—Hannah Parry, MSNBC Newsweek, 21 Oct. 2025
Recent Examples of Synonyms for light-years
Noun
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But beyond the text on his screen there are entire worlds—of history, philosophy, and maybe even of love—in the stories and people he and AI conjure.—
Literary Hub,
Literary Hub,
10 Nov. 2025
-
Their findings show that planets are far less common around stars in this late stage of life, suggesting that many close-orbiting worlds are likely destroyed as their stars expand, offering strong observational evidence of this dramatic planetary demise.—
Bojan Stojkovski,
Interesting Engineering,
8 Nov. 2025
Noun
-
The dark-sky park, certified by light pollution authority DarkSky International, has incredibly inky nightscapes that help the stars, galaxies, and planets pop.—
Stephanie Vermillion,
Travel + Leisure,
9 Nov. 2025
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Flares such as this one reveal the presence of incredibly large stars near the hearts of galaxies and shed light on the very structure of galaxies, Ford said.—
Ashley Strickland,
CNN Money,
7 Nov. 2025
Cite this Entry
“Light-years.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/light-years. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.
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