Meters to Light-minutes (m to lmin)

1 meter equals 5.559401587×10⁻¹¹ light-minutes (rounded).

1 meter = 5.559401587×10⁻¹¹ light-minutes

How to convert meters to light-minutes

To convert meters to light-minutes, multiply the number of meters by 5.559401587×10⁻¹¹. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply light-minutes by 17,987,547,480.

light-minutes = meters × 5.559401587×10⁻¹¹

Example: 10 meters = 5.559401587×10⁻¹⁰ light-minutes.

About these units

Meter (m)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI base unit of length. Since 1983 it is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Meter comes from the Greek metron, a measure. In 1791 the French National Assembly defined it as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, after rejecting the length of a seconds pendulum because that length changes with local gravity. The surveyors Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian arc, and in 1799 a platinum bar known as the Mètre des Archives became the physical standard. NIST notes that this Earth-based meter turned out to be about 0.2 mm shorter than the true pole-to-equator fraction it was meant to represent.

The 1875 Treaty of the Meter created the CGPM and the BIPM to look after common standards, and in 1889 a platinum-iridium prototype bar took over; the original is still kept at the BIPM. In 1960 the meter was tied to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of an orange-red krypton-86 line, and in 1983 to the speed of light, which made length a quantity derived from the time standard. The 2018 revision reworded that definition without changing the meter's size. NIST offers a handy yardstick for scale: a pace, meaning two steps, is roughly a meter or a yard.

The meter is the reference unit for length on this site.

Sources: BIPM: history of the metre; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Metre

Light-minute (lmin)

AstronomicalCurrent unit

The distance light travels in a minute (about 18 million km). The Sun is roughly 8.3 light-minutes from Earth.

Sunlight takes about 8.3 minutes to reach Earth, so the light-minute is the natural scale for the inner solar system. Its figure is exactly 60 light-seconds, which comes to 17,987,547,480 meters or about 18 million kilometers. The unit has no formal standing in the SI and no single inventor. It simply follows from the fixed speed of light, and it turns up in popular astronomy, in discussions of signal delays and in tables that give planetary distances as travel times.

Distance and delay are the same number in this unit, which makes it handy for spacecraft work. A signal to a distant spacecraft therefore cannot be answered instantly, because every light-minute of separation adds a minute each way. One astronomical unit is about 8.317 light-minutes, and Saturn's orbit at its closest approach to the Sun lies near 1.25 light-hours. Larger distances usually move up to light-hours or light-years.

1 light-minute = 17,987,547,480 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Light-minute; Wikipedia: Light-second

Related conversions

See all length units.