convention zone (13. 527)

The latest instalment of a multipart series on the Sun and its inner workings addresses in depth a fact briefly touched on in a recent post regarding the surprisingly glacial speed which a photon escapes the solar core to emerge as light and radiative energy. Whilst many of us may be cognisant of the fact that the beams of light reaching us from the Sun are eight minutes old due to the distance that they have to transverse and how looking up into the night sky is looking into the distant past, the fact that the stellar furnace is so dense that it takes a photon over one hundred thousand years to work its way through the crowd of excited particles to the surface strikes one as a strange contrast. Because protons emanate in all directions through the medium of packed plasma, the straightforward journey is impeded by obstacles at every step, the bumping into a fellow traveller and the redirection over and over again increases the time to make it from the core to the corona by a factor of a trillion, a dampening process calculated in a process called a random walk, that sustains the fusion reaction. This delayed makes the light in the sky prehistoric, older than civilisation.