Light takes about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth, but the energy carried in that sunlight was generated in the sun’s core tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago — bouncing through the sun’s interior for that entire time before finally escaping its surface and making the 8-minute trip across space

Sunlight takes about eight minutes and twenty seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth. That figure is well-known and accurate. The slightly less well-known part of the story is what happens before the eight-minute trip. The energy carried in any photon of sunlight currently reaching the Earth was generated by nuclear fusion in […]