ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Candela

Imagine you have a flashlight, and when you turn it on, it lights up everything in front of you. The amount of light that the flashlight gives off is measured in units called "candela."

Here's how it works: Scientists take a special machine called a photometer and use it to measure how bright the light is from the flashlight. They count how many photons (tiny particles of light) are coming out of the flashlight every second.

Then they take all of those photons and put them into a little pile. They measure how big that pile is and divide it by the area it covers. That gives them a number that tells them how bright the light is in a specific spot. That number is measured in units called "candela."

So basically, candela is just a fancy way of saying how bright a light is in one specific spot. Pretty cool, huh?