How many light years away is Mars from earth?

Question

83841 views around the world

You can reuse this answer
Creative Commons License

Answer 1 · 2016-03-14T12:17:40

Less than 1 light year.

Answer 2 · 2016-03-14T13:38:04

#4.2xx10^(-5)# light years

Light-years is not an adequate measure for distances inside the solar system. Symply a light-year is a humongously large measure of distance.

The distance between Earth and Mars is at the most 400 million km, and could be as small as 55 million km.

Even with the larger distance we would obtain:

#(400xx10^6 km )/(300000 km//s)~1333s #, which is about 22 minutes. So Mars can be at the most 22 light-minutes from the Earth.

Neverthless, here is your answer:

Just divide the time in seconds light takes between Earth and Mars, by the number of seconds within one year:

#1333/(365.25xx24xx60xx60)=4.2xx10^(-5)# light years