The sun’s slow energy highway: millennia inside the Sun before eight minutes to Earth
Eight minutes after leaving the Sun’s surface, sunlight reaches Earth, but the energy inside each photon spent 10,000–170,000 years zigzagging through the Sun’s dense core via countless absorption-and-reemission events; neutrinos escape in about two seconds, revealing the core’s workings, while the outer radiative and convective zones, and the photosphere, shape the final journey of energy to us.