How far is a parsec?
Anonymous The Doctor Responds: Short, sweet, and to the point, Anonymous. Usually, when someone declines to sign a name to a query, it is because he or she is afraid to show ignorance. In this case, however, your question reveals a good deal of knowledge, so you should not have been hesitant to sign your name. Specifically, the wording of your question shows that you know a parsec is a unit of distance. This puts you at the head of the class — and way ahead of those scriptwriters in Hollywood who seem to think that parsec is a unit of time The above is, of course, a direct reference to everybody’s favorite science fiction action-adventure movie, the 1977 classic “Star Wars.” In illuminating the speed of his beloved ship, pilot Han Solo boasts that the Millennium Falcon completed the Kessel run in under twelve parsecs. Any space pilot worth his wings would have known better. Star Wars fans have ever since tried to rationalize the error, by claiming that the shortest distance between tw
