Sunlight is way older than you think - Sten Odenwald 

This science stuff warms my inner core.

superb… crisp, concise, beautifully illustrated, easy to absorb… thank you… keep up your important work…

Ô Great Photons, your travel was long and full of obstacles ... but last you have reached my eyes. They welcome you as old friends and accept the gifts you gathered from your long and perilous journey.

This is one the best Ted-Ed video I'd ever watched. So compact yet so much information.

When you learn more about science from RU-vid than from school.

Now that's what we want from TED-Ed.

The sound and visual effects were awesome!

Sometimes i think my life is full of struggles bt watching universe fastest thing struggling for 170000 yrs ......makes me think that my life is so much easy....💙 thank u for that amazing video

to us, it spent ~170k years. to light, everything occurs instantly within an infinitely small amount of time.

Great stuff. If I wasn't retired, I'd use it in class tomorrow. Still follow all things SpaceMath.

We had to invent clothes while waiting for those damned photons to reach us.

Great video! Though the one problem with it is it says the light bounces around. Actually it is reabsorbed and re emitted, but the effect of it being reabsorbed and re emitted is similar to it bouncing around, so I understand them using bouncing around as an analogy to explain the photons journey. It's just easier to explain it in those terms.

Idk about you guys but each time i hear their intro and outro i get goosebumps and i LOVE IT

Clean explanation + great animation= superb video..thanks for this video.

This was really fascinating!

Seeing the end of the video, made me realize my whole entire existence. I'm scared and worried.

Brilliant video - very informative - thank you!

Love this video!

Amazing.

Thanks , great voice, great expression, great maths and a great scientific modal expressed in shortest time, great video overall. Thanks again.

Fascinating

Very informative, thank you.

This was a very interesting episode

Amazing video! Please keep up creating this content!

thanks for sharing

Muchas gracias TED-ed para tus videos educationales. Nos necesitamos esos para aprender rapido.

very informative and super impressive with the information organisation especially love the convey method that details go into more details

That was really interesting and the animations were great! :D

How much of the sun's light is made in the core? The surface is plenty hot enough to produce a lot of light on its own.

Ngl this is making me appreciate my days better.

PERFECT !! :) thank you

Sounds was dope.

Wonderful

The 3D part looks adorable.

I’m awed right now

You lost me before the first minute but I finished the video because of the very good voice, sound and illustration. ❤️

The core is a doorway and the sun isabentuty holding it open. The light is conscious and builds abridge to reach us .. I sense this

Amazing

mindblowing

Mind bending

This idea has been around for soooo long. I think it was around 2005 when this was announced. 10 years late TED -tisk-

Knowledge is power

Nice!

And I think to myself... What a wonderful day.

fascinating...

170,000 years pinballing its way towards the Sun's surface, all while still moving at the speed of light...that's awesome

That's a real example that the results people show up today come from years of hard work

I'm never going to see and feel the sunlight the same way again.

How could they have formulas for everything?! 😮

YOOOOO, this is dope dude

What about the photons generated at the surface of the sun? They have to travel only the space between the sun and the earth, requiring only 8 minutes?

Probelm?

Protons are not like "mirrors" reflecting photons that you see 170,000 years later. The nucleons (protons and neutrons) in the sun are constantly absorbing existing photons and generating new photons usually of lower energy and therefore lower frequency. This difference in photon energy keeps the sun hot due to increased thermal vibrations of nucleons due to the energy absorbed. So technically what you "see" on earth are just 8 min (500 seconds) old new photons who have parents and ancestors that date back to ~100K years starting from the core of the sun.

I have a question. So light takes all that time to reach the surface of the sun and approximately 8 minutes to reach Earth. What would happen if the sun itself hypothetically cease to exist? We know that we'd have 8 minutes of sunlight to enjoy. But what about gravity? When would the Earth no longer feel the suns gravity? Do gravitational forces or lack thereof happen faster, slower or equal to light.

Who else thought of "Centipede" the arcade game, when they talked about the protons getting hit by photon??

Is it just me or do I really like the sound it makes when a proton gets hit

isn't the photon technically absorbed and then reemitted? also, don't electrons absorb photons and reemit them too?

I basked for a second to appreciate the existence of these tiny photons.... my heart.

Unless I'm mistaken... does this suggest that light emanates ONLY from the core of the sun!? I never thought of it that way... always thought it's a big and, more or less, uniform "ball of light" 🤔

Thank you for the series of existential crisis.

WOW!

imagine u get this kind of learning video in daily school instead of just looking at books when we are young

How do you solve the random walk problem for heat-radiation in people?

Messed up my mind!

Me: *Gets sunburn* Me: What took you so long?

So..... What about the photons generated by the radiative emissivity of every single particle within the sun? I am pretty sure that not ALL of the light of the sun is generated by the fusion reaction's resultant photon emissions. As everyone knows, when you heat something up, it glows. So, when you have a star's worth of mater that is a minimum of 10,000 degrees; I think that is producing a large portion of the sun's light. So if a particle in the outer layers of the sun produces a photon, it wouldn't take that long....

good

This is something to think about.

Sooooo, who was it that measured the distance between photons? I'm just kind of curious how they made such a measurement

So theoretically there's a given amount of photons still ricocheing inside the sun from the day the sun first started shining and they could be still bouncing around in there till the sun dies or reach the surface and escape. Not only that but photons that were started at the beginning of the universe before our own sun that collided with our own sun and possibly got trapped from bumping into it while on a course towards wherever. That's pretty amazing and interesting at the same time

I think that due to the intense heat, the surface of the sun has gone incandescent, so it glows

Sun light from the sun reaches us as it is now.

Very Interesting...but I don't have Thousands of years to appreciate it...better learn quickly, no??

wow

ohh wow

1:27 so many steps would it take before you would actually take 2 full strides? :-D

Thanks to science we have TEDEd.🙏🏾

This description of the path of a photon seems to be from the point of view of an observer on Earth. However, and I welcome correction if I am wrong, according to Albert Einstein a traveler whose speed increases will have time slow down until reaching the speed of light (the speed of our photon), time will have stopped. So, from the point of view of the photon, it is created and instantly arrives at earth, with no passage of time.

speechless..

0:23 / 4:36

I think that the calculation of the first estimating has some mistake.. because the Sun's protons are evenly spread out,making the average distance between them about 1.0 x 10^-10 meters. To random walk the 690,000 kilometers from the core to the solar surface would then require 4.8 x 10^37 steps (Not- 3.9 x 10^37 steps), giving a total travel time of 500 billion years (Not- 400 billion years).

Anybody got any change?

So you're saying the sun we see in the morning is merely 170k years old image?!

Do you know why the ice ages existed? There was some traffic jam inside the Sun because the road maintenance workers forgot to increase the speed limit after their work was done. That made Earth not get it's daily Photon wage, and as such went on a temperature strike. The maintenance workers finally changed the speed limit back up again recently, but they wrote 511 km/h instead of 115 km/h, and now the earth is getting toasty.

Neat! Great video, I sure hope it is accurate, otherwise I'm going to look like an even bigger jerk when I pop-quiz my, now, ignorant family & friends.

Great episode. I wish I knew physics and math better. Also, remind me, how did we calculated Sun's mass?

The Random Walk Probelm? Never heard of it... I have heard of the Random Walk Problem though... interesting stuff... just an FYI TED editors!

What about time dilation? Does it have any effects?

What about surface reactions?

I'm literally watching this video 7 years after it has been posted 🤣

it's even getting harder to understand this science

But how far into space does little travel after it passes by earth ? Would be older the further it traveled.

the sun didnt start shining untill it was 170k years old?

Was the sun dark for the first 170,000 years of its life?

Guys u won't believe this co-incidence,if u have a slow internet connection,try getting buffering at 3:09 .......

I don't understand the calculation... :/

Theory. You should start by saying, " one of the theorys..." and not sell any of this as "fact". TED is the best ! Thank you. Stan

Are they the same photons, though?

I don't know how to process this information!! Does this mean that the sun we see is 170k years + 8 minutes old?

So, how can I apply this to Plinko?