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Thomas
@aviationdoctor.eth
Mind-blowing science factoid of the day: You already knew that it takes ~8 mins for photons to travel from the Sun to Earth (~150 million km). What you’re observing is a past Sun ~8 mins behind its actual position in the sky. However, each photon emitted by the Sun’s core first has to traverse dense radiative and then convective layers before reaching the surface of the photosphere. That journey involves a very slow and inefficient random walk (think Brownian motion and boiling fluid dynamics, respectively) through a dense soup of particles that constantly absorb and re-emit photons in new directions. The process takes between 10,000 and 170,000 years, and no single photon makes the full trip; the new photons eventually leaving the surface are the result of countless energy handovers along the way. This means that there’s a good chance that the energy of the sunlight you see today was generated before Homo sapiens even existed, even if the photons themselves were emitted ~8 mins ago.
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homie
@infinitehomie
@cstkpr save this
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