| Parsecs (pc) | Inches (in) |
|---|---|
| 1 Parsec | 1.2148336935 × 1018 in |
| 2 Parsecs | 2.429667387 × 1018 in |
| 3 Parsecs | 3.6445010805 × 1018 in |
| 4 Parsecs | 4.859334774 × 1018 in |
| 5 Parsecs | 6.0741684675 × 1018 in |
| 10 Parsecs | 1.2148336935 × 1019 in |
| 20 Parsecs | 2.429667387 × 1019 in |
| 25 Parsecs | 3.03708423375 × 1019 in |
| 50 Parsecs | 6.0741684675 × 1019 in |
| 100 Parsecs | 1.2148336935 × 1020 in |
| Reference | Parsecs (pc) | Inches (in) |
|---|---|---|
| A sheet of A4 paper (long side) | 9.62511 × 10-18 pc | 11.6929 in |
| Average adult human height | 5.50932 × 10-17 pc | 66.9291 in |
| A football pitch (length) | 3.40282 × 10-15 pc | 4133.86 in |
| A marathon | 1.36745 × 10-12 pc | 1661220 in |
| Height of Mount Everest | 2.86777 × 10-13 pc | 348386 in |
The parsec is a unit of distance equal to about 3.0857 × 1016 metres, or 3.26 light years. The symbol is pc. It is the standard distance unit in professional astronomy, used in preference to the light year in research literature.
The name is a contraction of parallax second, and the definition follows directly from how stellar distances are actually measured. As the Earth orbits the Sun, nearby stars appear to shift slightly against the more distant background. Half of that annual shift is the star's parallax angle. A star with a parallax of one arcsecond lies at a distance of one parsec. The relationship is a simple reciprocal: distance in parsecs equals one divided by parallax in arcseconds, which is why the unit is convenient for observers. No conversion is needed between the measurement and the result.
Formally the parsec is defined as 648,000 divided by pi astronomical units, a value the International Astronomical Union fixed exactly in 2015. Herbert Hall Turner proposed the name in 1913.
No star is close enough to have a parallax of a full arcsecond. Proxima Centauri, the nearest, has a parallax of about 0.77 arcseconds and lies 1.3 parsecs away. The angles involved are minute, which is why parallax was not successfully measured until 1838 despite being sought since antiquity. The Gaia spacecraft has since measured parallaxes for over a billion stars with microarcsecond precision.
Multiples handle larger scales. The Milky Way is about 30 kiloparsecs across, and distances between galaxy clusters run to megaparsecs. The Hubble constant is conventionally quoted in kilometres per second per megaparsec.
The unit is widely known from a line in Star Wars in which the Millennium Falcon completes a route in under twelve parsecs, a distance where a time would be expected.
Cosmology works in megaparsecs and gives the unit a role in one of its central quarrels. The Hubble constant, the rate at which the universe expands, is quoted in kilometres per second per megaparsec: a galaxy one megaparsec away recedes at about seventy kilometres a second, one two megaparsecs away at twice that. Measurements from the cosmic microwave background give a value near 67, while those from supernovae and variable stars give about 73, and the gap between them has resisted a decade of effort to close it. Whatever resolves the disagreement, it will be argued over in this unit.
One parsec equals 3.26156 light years, 206,265 astronomical units, or 30.857 trillion kilometres.
The inch is a unit of length equal to exactly 25.4 millimetres. It is one twelfth of a foot and one thirty-sixth of a yard. The symbol is in, though a double prime is common in technical contexts and a straight double quote is often substituted informally.
The name comes from the Latin uncia, meaning a twelfth part, which also gave English the word ounce. Early definitions were anatomical or agricultural. A statute of Edward II defined the inch as three barleycorns laid end to end, and the width of a man's thumb served as a working approximation in several European languages. Dutch and Swedish still use words for inch that mean thumb.
Its modern precision dates from 1959, when the International Yard and Pound Agreement fixed the yard at exactly 0.9144 metres across the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Before that agreement the American and British inches differed very slightly, which mattered in precision manufacturing. The United States retained a separate survey inch for land measurement until it was formally retired at the end of 2022.
The inch remains dominant in several international industries regardless of local measurement systems. Screen sizes are quoted in inches worldwide, measured diagonally. Tyre rim diameters, bicycle wheel sizes, plumbing pipe bores and rack-mounted equipment all use inch designations, and the standard 19-inch rack is a global fixture. Photographic sensor sizes use inch fractions that no longer correspond to any real dimension, a survival from television camera tube measurements.
Subdivision is traditionally binary rather than decimal. An inch is halved repeatedly into eighths, sixteenths and thirty-seconds, which suits ruler markings and fits the fractional sizing of drill bits and spanners. Decimal inches are used in machining, where thousandths of an inch are called thou or mils.
Screens and printing keep it in daily use far outside the countries that use it for anything else. Televisions, monitors and phones are sold by the diagonal in inches everywhere, so a 55-inch television has the same name in Paris as in Chicago. Typography rests on the same base: there are 72 points to the inch, a convention inherited from the printing trade and written into every computer font system, and image resolution is quoted in dots or pixels per inch. Anyone laying out a page in a country that has been metric for a century is therefore working, without particular thought, in twelfths and seventy-seconds of an inch.
One inch equals 25.4 millimetres, 2.54 centimetres, or 0.0254 metres exactly.