Most of the stars are billions of kilometers away from us. Billion is a number with nine zeroes. However, astronomers specify distances in space in different unit called, light years, as doing calculations with too many zeroes is a problem. A light year is the distance covered by light in one year. The speed of light is 300,000 km/s. If we count the number of seconds in a year (60x60x24x365), and multiply it with the speed of light, we get the distance covered by light in one year: 9460 billion kilometers. Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to the sun, is 4.2 light years away from the Earth.
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