Join Above and Beyond to explore "The Drunken Photon" and the captivating journey of photons from the sun's core to space. Witness their random walk of energy in 10,000 to 200,000 years! 🌞🍻
Transcript:
Ahhh… Take a moment, and look to the sky.
Allow our local star’s light to warm your face. Where’d that light come from?
Well it starts deep in the sun’s core. Atoms there are densely packed. Temperatures soar. Under these extreme conditions light atoms fuse to become heavier atoms.
Every fusion event births photons. Let. There. Be. Light!
But that’s not the end of the story.
Each photon is born into an overcrowded party of nearby atoms and particles. A photon moves in a straight line until it’s absorbed by another nearby particle. That particle will then re-emit a photon, on a different straight-line journey until it’s reabsorbed by yet another particle—and so on and so forth.
It’s random too, the direction it’s emitted each time.
Each emission and absorption event is a short step in a random walk of energy that eventually leads to the release of a photon into space.
How long does this drunken photon take to stagger out of the Sun? About 10,000 to 200,000 years.
It depends on how much Moonshine it had.