Did you know that a ray of sunlight takes over 8 minutes to travel from the Sun to Earth?

The Earth is on average 150 million (150,000,000) km away from the Sun. A ray of sunlight (or light, in general) travels at the speed of light, which is approximately 300,000 km/s.

A simple calculation gives us:

150,000,000 km / 300,000 km/s = 500 seconds
500 seconds is 8 minutes and 20 seconds.

The additional effect is that we’re looking at how the Sun appeared 8 minutes ago. So, in a way, we’re looking back in time. If a large solar flare occurs on the Sun, we’ll only see it 8 minutes after it happened. This effect also applies to light from other objects in the universe, allowing us to look back in the universe’s history.

The image accompanying this article is from Freepik.com