3 ms·
I often hear about the LY unit of distance. Why is it that we are still discovering things which are close to us in LY units? Wouldn’t we discover things at a d
by cced 7y ago
I often hear about the LY unit of distance. Why is it that we are still discovering things which are close to us in LY units? Wouldn’t we discover things at a distance of 5xLY before discovering things at a distance of 100xLY?
- Tuna-Fish 7y agoThings that are very luminous can be seen much further away than things that are very dim. This particular star is a tiny red dwarf, which is so dim we only just found the star itself in 2003. Our best planet-finding methods depend on finding signals in the light output of the host star. This is relatively insensitive to distance, but very sensitive to the properties of the star.