Post #29 My top 5 units of distance

Welcome back to Elliott's Quarantine Quintet!

    1. Light-year

While this unit may first bring to mind Buzz Lightyear from the Toy Story movies, it is a common unit used in space to show things such as the distance between stars. The unit is derived by the distance that light would travel in a year. One light year is approximately 5.8786 x 10^12 miles (that's 5,878,600,000,000 miles) or approximately 3.1039 x 10^16 feet (that's 31,039,000,000,000,000 feet).

    2. Parsec

Han Solo bragged about making the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, but, as any Star Wars nerd will all too happily tell you, a parsec is a unit of distance, not time. The unit is derived from something having to do with astronomy and trigonometry that I don't understand (and would need Neil deGrasse Tyson to explain) and is also used when relating astronomical distances. The bottom line is that a parsec is approximately 1.9174 x 10^13 miles that's (19,174,000,000,000 miles), or about 3.3 light-years.

    3. Angstrom

From the incredibly big to the incredibly small, this unit - which is named after 19th century Swedish physicist Anders Jonas Angstrom - is one ten-billionth of a meter (0.0000000001 meters). Angstroms are used to measure atomic distances. Since Mr. Angstrom was Swedish, his name as well as the name of the eponymous unit of distance officially contains a Swedish A, which has a little squiggle over it.

    4. League

How deep is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. My cursory research has discovered that the definition of a league varies by country. Since Jules Verne was French, it is commonly held that he was referring to French metric league, which is 4 kilometers. So 20,000 leagues is 80,000 kilometers (about 49,710 miles). That is over six times the diameter of the Earth, but you can do those things in science fiction.

    5. Hand

This unit is exclusively used to measure the height of horses. A hand has been standardized to 4 inches, which is supposed to represent the distance between the tip of the thumb and the tip of the pinky when your fingers are fully spread out (fun fact, my hand is bigger than a hand).




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