Capella is actually a quadruple star system 42.9 light-years away in Auriga. The two main stars are both giant stars orbiting each other closely, making it one of the most luminous binary systems visible to the naked eye.
Capella is 42.9 light-years from Earth. That is about 406 trillion km (252 trillion miles), or 2.71 million astronomical units.
| Unit | Distance |
|---|---|
| Light-years | 42.9 |
| Kilometers | 406,000,000,000,000 km |
| Miles | 252,000,000,000,000 miles |
| Astronomical units (AU) | 2,710,000 astronomical units |
| Parsecs | 13.2 |
Light from Capella takes 42.9 years to reach Earth, so the light you see tonight left Capella 42.9 years ago.
Voyager 1, the fastest object humans have sent into deep space, travels at about 17 km/s. It would need about 756,500 years to cover this distance.
Notable For: 6th brightest star, closest first-magnitude star to north celestial pole
At light speed, it would take 42.9 years to reach Capella. At 1g constant acceleration with deceleration, a traveler would experience about 17.4 years.
Capella consists of two pairs of binary stars. The main pair are two yellow giant stars orbiting each other in 104 days. A second pair of red dwarf stars orbits farther away.
Capella is 42.9 light-years from Earth, which is about 406 trillion km or 252 trillion miles. Light from Capella takes 42.9 years to reach us.
Capella is 42.9 light-years from Earth. One light-year is about 9.46 trillion km, the distance light travels in one year. In parsecs, Capella is about 13.2 parsecs away.
This time dilation calculator lets you enter a distance in light-years and acceleration in m/s² to see how time dilation affects your journey. It shows differences between traveler and observer times, maximum velocity, energy requirements, Doppler shift, Lorentz factor, and how distances vary between reference frames. Charts appear after you calculate.
Time dilation is an effect from Einstein's theory of special relativity. The faster you move, the slower time passes for you compared to someone standing still. At 90% of light speed, time passes about 2.3 times slower for the traveler than for someone on Earth.
The Time Dilation Formula is:
Where:
t' = time measured by the observer (on Earth)
t = time experienced by the traveler
v = velocity of the traveler
c = speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second)