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About these units
Mil (mil)
A mil is an imperial-derived engineering unit equal to one-thousandth of an inch. It is used extensively in manufacturing, machining, and electrical engineering. Printed circuit board (PCB) trace widths, for instance, are often measured in mils because the unit provides a convenient scale for precision without resorting to decimals in inches. Because 1 mil equals 25.4 micrometers, it occupies a scale appropriate for tolerances in industrial production, coatings, film thickness, and gaskets. The mil is especially common in the United States, where certain engineering standards still rely on the imperial system. It provides an intuitive small-scale measurement for technicians accustomed to inches, helping avoid errors that might result from metric conversions.
Parsec (pc)
A parsec is equal to 3.26 light years, or approximately 3.0857 × 10¹⁶ meters. It is defined based on the method of stellar parallax, the apparent shift in a star's position caused by Earth's orbit around the Sun. Specifically, a star at a distance of one parsec exhibits a parallax angle of one arcsecond (1/3600 of a degree). Because its definition emerges directly from geometric measurement techniques, the parsec became the standard astronomical unit for professional research. Parallax-based distances are foundational to the cosmic distance ladder — the sequence of methods by which astronomers measure distances from nearby stars to the farthest galaxies. The parsec is widely used in astrophysics because calculations involving gravitational dynamics, luminosity, or galactic structure often become more intuitive in parsecs than in light years. Although less familiar to the public, it is the preferred unit in scientific publications, planetary catalogs, and distance mapping of the Milky Way.