MicroFactzzz#0127 · 🧠 Science WTF
A photon born at the Sun's core can take hundreds of thousands of years just to reach the surface
Sunlight takes eight minutes to reach Earth, but the energy from the Sun's core takes far, far longer to fight its way out of the Sun itself.
Light that reaches our eyes takes only about eight minutes to travel from the Sun's surface to Earth — a fact everyone hears at some point in a physics class.
What's much less well known: before a photon of energy generated by nuclear reactions deep in the Sun's core ever reaches its surface, dramatically more time passes — estimates range from tens of thousands to over a million years.
The reason: the Sun's interior is so dense that a photon constantly collides with plasma particles, gets absorbed and re-emitted in a random direction, and ends up taking a chaotic, meandering "random walk" outward instead of flying in a straight line.
In other words: the sunlight warming your face today was probably produced in the Sun's core long before the first humans existed on Earth — it's only the final leg of the journey, from the surface to Earth, that's fast.
Sources
- General knowledge / encyclopedic sources
This fact is based on generally available knowledge, not a single, citable source. See how we approach verification.
Krulicza Nora
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