Rarely do you get answers greater than a million years unless you have made a serious error! Why do you still see these erroneous estimates of '10 million years' still being used? Because textbook authors and editors do not bother to actually make the correct calculation themselves, and rely on older published answers from similar textbooks. Light escapes the sun's core through a series of random steps as it is absorbed and emitted by atoms along the way Courtesy - Richard Pogge Ohio State U.
So, sometimes a simple question can have many inaccurate textbook answers because it is not considered a very important question to scientists, and no one bothers to take the time to really work out the answer to their best ability!
As another example, in , the physicists Alfred Goldhaber and Michael Nieto at the Los Alamos Laboratory estimated the maximum mass of the hypothetical graviton particle - the carrier of the force of gravity.
Their answer of grams seemed incredibly insignificant. Over a decade later they published an improved version of his original paper. They noted that they had originally made an error in their paper, so that the calculated mass was actually over a billion times larger. The short answer is that it takes sunlight an average of 8 minutes and 20 seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth. We orbit the Sun at a distance of about million km.
Divide these and you get seconds, or 8 minutes and 20 seconds. This is an average number. Remember, the Earth follows an elliptical orbit around the Sun, ranging from million to million km.
At its closest point, sunlight only takes seconds to reach Earth. How Old Is the Sun? Is it really old? Or not so much? How do we know the Sun's age? How long will the Sun shine? More about the Sun! This is where all the nuclear fusion magic happens. Surrounding the core is the radiative zone. It extends from 0. As we move through the radiative zone, the temperature drops by about an order of magnitude, from 15 million degrees C in the core to to 2 million degrees C on the outer edge of the radiative zone.
The density drops too. Further out is the convective zone. It extends all the way to the visible surface. Radiative and convective zones got their names from the way the energy is being transferred through each zone, i. In between the two zones is tachocline, a thin [but very important] interface area.
Finally, the outermost part of the Sun is the atmosphere. Our photon loses a lot of energy to these collisions, becoming first X-ray and then UV photon. Through this continuous random bouncing back and forth no wonder that mathematically this problem is known as random walk , up to a million years after it was born, our photon finally enters the convective zone.
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