The light hitting your screen has a life story
Eight minutes,
twenty seconds.
Every ray of sunlight falling outside right now left the Sun at —:—:— — after spending a hundred thousand years fighting its way out. This is the journey. You are the destination.
Chapter I · The core · T−100,000 years
Born in a furnace.
Fifteen million degrees. Two hundred and fifty billion atmospheres. In the Sun's core, hydrogen nuclei are crushed into helium — and the sliver of mass left over becomes a flash of pure energy.
A photon. This one is yours.
Chapter II · The radiative zone
Then it gets lost.
The plasma here is so dense that light travels about a centimetre before being absorbed and spat back out — in a random direction. Your photon will do this some 10²⁵ times. The exit is only 500,000 km away. The walk takes millennia.
TIME TRAPPED INSIDE THE SUN — 0 YEARS
Run your cursor through the plasma. It notices.
Chapter III · The photosphere · T+00:00
Daylight, at last.
At the surface the plasma thins to transparency and — for the first time since the Stone Age — nothing stands in the way. The photon leaves at 299,792,458 metres per second. It will never slow down, and it will never stop.
The clock starts now.
T+03:13 · 58,000,000 km
Three minutes to Mercury.
Space is silent, black, and almost insultingly empty. Nothing to bounce off. Nothing to slow for. Mercury slides past — 430 °C on the sunlit side, −180 °C in the shade — and the photon doesn't even wave.
T+06:01 · 108,000,000 km
Six minutes. Venus.
A greenhouse with no exit: clouds of sulphuric acid over a surface hot enough to melt lead. A warning shot of a world.
Dead ahead, a pale blue dot is getting bigger.
T+08:19 · The last 100 km
The sky takes its cut.
Air, finally. Nitrogen and oxygen scatter the bluest light in every direction — the sky is blue because of all the photons that didn't make it to you directly. Yours threads through the entire atmosphere in a third of a millisecond.
T+08:20.000 · Arrival
The last nanosecond.
Through a pupil two millimetres wide, onto a curved screen of a hundred million cells. One molecule of rhodopsin folds. One electrical whisper rides the optic nerve.
150 million kilometres, spent in an instant, to become something new: a thought.
That's your pupil. It's doing this right now.
You never see the present.
Everything you look at is history. The Sun, as it was eight minutes ago. The nearest star, four years. The Moon, a second and a half. This screen — about two nanoseconds.
Old light is the only light there is.
PHOTONS THAT HAVE ENTERED YOUR EYES SINCE YOU OPENED THIS PAGE ≈ 0
BR8T
No images · No video · No libraries
Every frame of this page is drawn live by your GPU, from mathematics.
The sunlight arriving as you read this left the Sun at —:—:—.