Scott Air Force Base, IL Demographic Information *. There is no Census data for the city of SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, IL. We have pulled information for the ZIP Code 62225 instead.
A light-year is a unit of distance. It is the distance that light can travel in one year. Light moves at a velocity of about 300,000 kilometers (km) each second. So in one year, it can travel about 10 trillion km. More p recisely, one light-year is equal to 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers.
So light crosses that distance in about a second. Meanwhile, the average distance from the Sun to the Earth is ~149,597,886 km (92,955,817 miles), which means that light only takes about 8 minutes to make that journey. Little wonder then why the speed of light is the metric used to determine astronomical distances. When we say a star like Proxima Centauri is 4.25 light years away, we are saying that it would take â traveling at a constant speed of 1.07 billion km per hour (670,616,629 mph) â about 4 years and 3 months to get there.