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.

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?” Together, we’d prance up Fifth Avenue to Barbizon, to the little door where all the girls zoomed in. I’d wave goodbye as Donna disappeared into a world of poise, posture, and panty hose. I was captivated. To understand this, imagine that the light from a distant star sets off on its journey to your eye. The particle of light leaves the star's surface and travels for millions of light-years through space. As it does so, time continues moving forward for the star. By the time the particle of light reaches your eye, several million years has passed, and you are seeing the star as it was when the light particle first left.Danish astronomer Ole Rømer was able to make an estimate in 1676, using the timing of eclipses of Jupiter's moon Io. Later, in 1729, James Bradley used a phenomenon called stellar aberration, in which the apparent positions of stars in the sky seem to change slightly depending on the movement of the Earth, to get a closer estimate of light's velocity. Scientists kept refining these estimates, and by the 1860s, Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell showed that electromagnetic waves travel at a certain speed in a vacuum. That speed is a constant, and at the time, most physicists thought of light as a pure wave. (We know now it can be a particle, too). How much is that? The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second, or 299,792.5 kilometers per second. That's 670.6 million mph (170.9 million km/h). In comparison, the distance to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light-years, or 24.7 trillion miles (39.8 trillion km).

Having grown up in a spotless space-age home, I developed an unwholesome desire for all things vine-choked and Victorian. On weekends, I searched yard sales and junk stores for buried treasure. I found mad crystals and silk tassels, tintypes and diaries. I carried home a case of butterflies—each one stabbed through the heart with a pin. Finished in ’56, our house was my father’s midcentury masterpiece. Featured in newspapers and fashion shoots, our house was new, new, new!—no attic, no heirlooms, no trace of the past. On my own, I walked around town in my miniature man-suit, window-shopping. I’d study all the stylish women walking into Saks. Style was a bid for happiness, a kind of hope. Calculate the distance in kilometers. If you wanted to calculate in kilometers, simply replace the speed of light with the speed in kilometers per second: 3.00 x 10 5. The time in seconds remains the same because there is no conversion required. [8] X Research source How far is that? Multiply the number of seconds in one year by the number of miles or kilometers that light travels in one second, and there you have it: one light-year. It’s about 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). This chart shows objects close to home and takes us all the way out to the Andromeda Galaxy, the most distant object most people can see with the unaided eye. And then, it shows one of the oldest galaxies ever found. Image via NASA Space Place.Barnard's Star is a red dwarf star and is the fourth nearest star to the Sun at approximately 6 light years distance. To convert feet into miles, remember that there are 5,280 feet in a mile: x ft (1 mile/5280 ft) = miles. [9] X Research source Arthur N. Cox, ed. (2000), Allen's Astrophysical Quantities (fourthed.), New York: Springer-Valeg, p.12, ISBN 978-0-387-98746-0 The next closest star to us is about 4.3 light-years away. So, when we see this star today, we’re actually seeing it as it was 4.3 years ago. All of the other stars we can see with our eyes are farther, some even thousands of light-years away. Define the speed of light. Light in a vacuum travels at a velocity of 186,000 miles per second. This is the equivalent of 299,792 kilometers per second or 670,616,629 miles per hour. [5] X Research source Here we will use the velocity in miles-per-second.