noun
- a unit of astronomical distance equal to about 3.26 light-years
Usage: astronomy
Examples
- The nearest star to our solar system is about 1.3 parsecs away.
- Astronomers measure distances to nearby galaxies in thousands of parsecs.
- One parsec equals approximately 19 trillion miles.
- The Milky Way galaxy is about 30,000 parsecs in diameter.
- Scientists use parsecs to calculate the distances between stars.
- The Andromeda Galaxy is located roughly 780,000 parsecs from Earth.