Janice Lalo, age 8, of Allentown, PA „ for her question:

How long is a light year?

When we look up at the sky, we are gazing out across the vast oceans of space, This is what we see when we look up from any spot on the face of the big, round globe which is our earth, At night we see the stars, dotted like lonely, bright islands in the big oceans of space  They are separated by millions arid billions and trillions of miles  In fact, a million miles is dust a tiny step in the vastness of apace  The nearest star to our sun which we see from north of the equator is more than 50 million, million miles away, South of the equator we can see a star which is about 26 million, million miles away  But not many stars are this close 

The astronomers need a long, long measuring rod for these vast distances in the sky  One of these is the light year, which is the distance a beam of light travels in one year  Its speed is about 186,000 miles a second and the distance it travels in one year is almost six, million, million miles  The length of a light year in miles is 588 followed by nine zero‑