The Longest Journey Sunlight Ever Takes Happens Before It Leaves The Sun - ScienceAlert

The Longest Journey Sunlight Ever Takes Happens Before It Leaves The Sun ScienceAlert Most people think the Sun is a vast ball of burning gas, but that familiar picture is quietly wrong: the Sun is plasma, a fourth state of matter — atoms torn into charged particles, the same stuff as lightning and neon Space Daily Every second, the Sun converts about 600 million tonnes of hydrogen into helium and loses roughly 4 million tonnes of that mass outright as energy, and the light warming your face today left the core as gamma rays that took somewhere between 10,000 and 1 ScienceBlog.

com You never see the Sun as it is, only as it was: its light takes eight minutes and twenty seconds to cross the 150 million kilometres to Earth — so if the Sun blinked out, we would bask on, unknowing, for eight more minutes ScienceBlog.