what is the value of this number 29.3 ± 1.6 mly?
im trying to find the distance of certain galaxies and stuff, and i run into this number as stated above
what is the value of it, and how can i find the value of it.
i know a ton about astronomy and i have been studying it for 6 years and im only 13. only that i have no clue about the symbol in the number. any help?
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Are you sure it was written as "mly"? Usually a capital "M" is used for "mega" = "million". The small "m" usually means "milli" or 1/1000, which wouldn't make sense here.
My guess is that this said 29.3 +- 1.6 Mly, and that it is 29.3 million light years, with a margin of error of 1.6 million light years. So 27.7 to 30.9 million light years. No experimental number is ever known exactly. There is always a margin of error due to limits in the precision of the measurement.
Mly is an obscure notation meaning 10^ light-years. Per Wikipedia:
One megalight-year, abbreviated "Mly", is one million light-years, or about 306,600 parsecs. Megalight-years are typically used to measure distances between neighboring galaxies and galaxy clusters.
So the distance in your question is 29,300,000 ± 1,600,000 light years