FUN FACT

robably more familiar to fans of than readers the term “parsec” was coined by the British astronomer Herbert Hall Turner in 1913. It’s a portmanteau of “parallax of one second”. Turner developed this unit of astronomical length to simplify measurements of large distances between astronomical objects outside the Solar System. A parsec is around 3.26 light-years or 206 000 astronomical units in other words, 30.9 trillion kilometres. often gets it wrong, though.