Why learn about exponents?*
Exponents
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- The distance to the open cluster Pleiades is 130 parsecs from Earth. That's miles.
- The center of the Milky Way is more than 8 kiloparsecs (a kiloparsec is 1000 parsecs) from Earth, and the Milky Way is roughly 34 kiloparsecs across.
- The nearest star to Earth, Proxima Centauri, is about 1.3 parsecs from the sun.
- Most of the stars visible to the unaided eye in the nighttime sky are within 500 parsecs of the sun.