The Light Years: Elizabeth Jane Howard (Cazalet Chronicles)

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She’d already done summer training at the Barbizon Modeling School. For the two months of the program, Donna and I had taken a bus to New York City every Saturday. Though I was five years younger than my sister, Mom dubbed me Donna’s chaperone. Preparing our outfits took the better part of Friday night. There is a photo of Donna in a peach cashmere wrap, with a taupe fedora and white eye shadow; I’m standing beside her in a glimmer-blue suit and yellow ascot. Unlike the speed of a car, train or plane, the speed of which can change, the speed of light is constant and never changes. We know that through the vacuum of space, light travels at 670,616,629 mph (1,079,252,849 km/h).

It was the exact right word. Instantly, she came alive. “You know, I always meant to do something down there. Make a statement. I don’t know why the girls we hire don’t make more of an effort. Why live in squalor?” A modern classic, The Light Years is a story of twentieth-century English life in the countryside and the first in Elizabeth Jane Howard's extraordinary, bestselling family saga The Cazalet Chronicles. In other words, a light-second is the distance light travels in one second, or 7.5 times the distance around Earth’s equator. So, a light-year is the distance light travels in one year. A light-year is a measure of the distance it takes light to travel through interstellar space over the course of a year.The Oort cloud is approximately two light-years in diameter. Its inner boundary is speculated to be at 50 000au, with its outer edge at 100 000au. The Sadiq own The Haji, a sub-light ship used to carry goods between planet. While this ship is very valuable, it’s getting old and the family cannot afford to lose it. The captain has a plan to transform it by using the remains of a warship powered by a lost technology. To do so, she needs the help of a physic scientist well-versed in the subject. a b c d e International Astronomical Union, Measuring the Universe: The IAU and Astronomical Units , retrieved 10 November 2013

The universe is everything. It includes all of space, and all the matter and energy that space contains. It even includes time itself and, of course, it includes you.As mentioned above, light travels at an incredible 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/sec). That’s very fast, indeed. In fact, if you could travel at the speed of light, you would be able to circle the Earth’s equator about 7.5 times in just one second! The kitchen was immaculate, wrapped in Formica, smooth as snow. And though Mom had dined all over the world, she seemed happiest in her own kitchen, performing for twenty guests in a snug apron and high heels. By some Catholic miracle, her figure improved with each child. Babies, she said, were her beauty secret. Perhaps most of my disappointment in The Light Years was wrapped up in that simple sentence. This is not a romance, and the blurb made it sound that at least some of the book would be devoted to romance. In reality, maybe only 5% was devoted to that concept.

Objects in our universe are extremely far away. In fact, they’re so far away that kilometers or miles aren’t a useful measure of their distance. So, with this in mind, we speak of space objects in terms of light-years, the distance light travels in a year. Light is the fastest-moving stuff in our universe. It travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 km/sec). So, a light-year is 5.88 trillion miles (9.46 trillion km).

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Determine the correct conversion factor. You need to identify the units for the distance that you’re converting to light years. If you’re converting from kilometers to light years, you will use a different conversion factor than if you’re converting from miles. When I suggested we paint, Mom smiled. “How about a wild yellow? Maybe a marigold—the kind of yellow that wants to be orange.” Make the jump to light-years as we cruise through the Milky Way galaxy. Video credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.