Or, rather, light years per second!

Well, actually, if you think about it, one light-second is about 186,000 miles, or just under 300,000 kilometres, which is a convenient unit for measuring millions of kilometres. One million miles is about 5.3 light seconds. For instance, light takes three seconds to get to the moon, and 4:19 to get from the sun to the earth. Much easier to say than approximately 92 million miles...

And think on this - at one LYPS you'd cover the entire solar system, from the one edge of Pluto's orbit to the other, in about six milliseconds. Blink and you'd miss it entirely. To journey to the nearest star would take a bit over four seconds - just enough for you to take a gulp of the beverage of your choice. And yet it would take over a day - about 26 hours - to get from one side of the galaxy to the other. Just getting from here to the hub of the Milky Way would take you about eight hours twenty minutes.

And it would take you over a month to get to the nearest big galaxy, Andromeda.

Big distances, eh? I love science.

Have fun,

Paul