Would someone explain "light years" to me?

A light year is a unit of distance. It is how far light can travel in a year. For example, the Earth is approximately 8 light minutes from the sun.

4.6 or 4.8 billion miles…something like that…

Yes, Jill is right, the name is misleading because it is a measure of distance, not time.

@XxBOOMxX You’re off by about three orders of magnitude, it’s about 5.88 trillion miles.

5,878,625,373,183.608 miles traveled in a year

9,460,730,472,580.8 km traveled in a year

LIght travels c. 186,000 miles/per second. That can be called (although it isn’t) a light second.

It’s kind of like saying “I live an hour away by train”, if that helps. The distance to my house is the distance a train goes in an hour.

Yikes!
I stand WAY corrected.
Now, take your medicine here, I think the doctor said ½ cup…he coulda said teaspoon, ...anyway…
C’mon…

You already got the right answer but here is more info to help put it in persepctive. Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun. It talkes light 8 minutes to get here, so we are 8 light minutes from the sun.
The nearst star is 4.2 light years away. Our galaxy (all the stars you can see in the night sky the milky way) is 100,000 light years across

In our lab we have some incredibly fast measurement devices. They can measure time shorter than a tenth of a nanosecond (billionth of a second). Light travels about an inch in that time.

And to expand on @worriedguy ‘s astronomy lesson….

Here’s another thing to blow your mind. When you look up at the stars at night, many of them very well may have exploded thousands of years ago… their light is still making it’s way to our planet.

Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space. So big in fact that the usual measurements of distance become utterly meaningless with hundreds of zeros and so we have tried to invent other ways of describing the universe in such a way that we can comprehend just how far away stuff is.

3.26 lightyears is about 1 parsec if it helps.

3.27 light years = 1 parsec (The only thing I remember from college astronomy. That and black holes were not what I originally thought.)

@Sueanne_Tremendous: (lovely to see your name here)

So, for the really curious, a parsec is a unit of distance used in astronomy, equal to about 3.25 light years (3.08 × 1016 meters). One parsec corresponds to the distance at which the mean radius of the earth’s orbit subtends an angle of one second of arc.