While reading the news on myyahoo today I came across this story about a black hole found 13 Billion light years away. As I thought about it, I really realized that 13 billion light years is a completely incomprehensible distance. So being the curious type that I am I set out to find out how far that really is.

I started out by looking up some values:

Astronomical Unit (AU):
1 AU = 149,598,000 Km (kilometers)

Light-year (ly) :
1 ly = 63239.6717 AU

So:

13,000,000,000 ly * 63239.6717 = 822,000,000,000,000 AU

822,000,000,000,000 * 149,598,000 =
123,000,000,000,000,000,000,000Km

Hmm…

so there are 123 x 10^21 km in 13 billion light-years
or 76.4 X 10^21 miles for us here in the States.

OK, that didn’t help at all. Like I said, completely incomprehensible