this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2024
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I use to be able to ask google the distance in kilometers of anything in space and get an accurate answer. So I first asked this same question in google but it only gave the answer in light years for some reason. That's when I went to bing and got their ridiculous answer.
It's a mess. I just used Google Assistant (not even Gemini) to ask the distance in km and got this -
According to the website Space, the distance is 37.8 trillion km.
I know which one I'm going with but finding out assistant is wrong is a big deal. Lots of people will assume like I did that the info is just pulled from relevant websites. Can't do that now.
This is not correct, and is probably the result of rounding the light year distance to 4 ly before converting to km. The google answer is pretty close.
The correct answer is the distance to Alpha Centauri is 41.5 petameters (trillion km) and the distance to Proxima Centauri is 40.2 petameters.
Space.com got it wrong? Well that will teach me to triple check my sources!
Thanks for clarifying.