Talk:Astronomical unit

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Please clarify "150 million"

The figure of 150 million km appears to be in the long scale. This should be specified instead of left to the vagueries of readers' individual dialects. And the equivalent in the short scale should be provided to make this accessible for users of other English dialects. 2601:441:4400:1740:3177:7AD6:4BF8:3864 (talk) 02:51, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Or maybe I misread and it's in the short scale. Like I said it really needs to be clarified when using vague words like "million" for a precise number. 2601:441:4400:1740:3177:7AD6:4BF8:3864 (talk) 02:53, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers states "Billion and trillion are understood to represent their short-scale values of 10⁹ (1,000,000,000) and 10¹² (1,000,000,000,000), respectively. Keep this in mind when translating articles from non-English or older sources."

Two more examples

The table "Examples" in this article gives a wonderful sense of relative sizes, although not strictly required in this article on the astronomical unit. / / I would like to suggest two lines be added at the bottom: distance to the nearest extra-galactic object, and distance to the nearest galaxy. I would attempt to add them myself, but I would only have wikipedia to go on, which I believe is not quite the standard required. Nick Barnett (talk) 10:47, 7 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

why is Earth the only planet that people living on it 41.121.99.100 (talk) 16:51, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Because on Earth 🌍 there is Water 💦,Soil and Air 41.121.99.100 (talk) 16:53, 5 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Rounding errors, or contradicting sources

This article in #Development_of_unit_definition:

> 1 astronomical unit [..] ≈ 499.004783836 light-seconds

Same article, in the table at #Examples:

> Light-second [≈] 0.0019 [au]

I would expect that rounded value to be 0.002 or more, not less. 2A10:3781:11DB:1:1993:C326:C2A3:B78 (talk) 14:12, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. Light-second expressed in au is 149,597,780,700 / 299,792,458 = 0.002003989. I made the change Jc3s5h (talk) 16:30, 16 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]