How long does it take a ray of sunshine to reach planet earth?

Question

How long does it take a ray of sunshine to reach planet earth?

Answer 1

Approx. 8 minutes. I assume the previous entries are correct at 8.3.

Answer 2

8 minutes

Answer 3

See previous question in Yahoo.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/indexq...

In a nutshell, the earth's orbit around the sun is elliptical, therefore the distance varies. The travel time of light will vary depending on where the earth is in its orbit. On average, light takes approx 8.3 minutes to reach the earth.

Answer 4

A little over eight minutes.

Answer 5

8.3 minutes.

Hope I helped.

Answer 6

The speed of light in vacuum is 300,000kilometers per sec.

Sun is away by150 million kilometers.So answer is 8.3minute as given earlier is correct.

Answer 7

Millions of years.

At the core of the Sun, a gamma ray photon gets emitted during a nuclear fusion event.  This photon gets absorbed and emitted countless times on it's random walk to the surface.  This literally takes millions of years.  Once at the surface, it takes only 8.3 minutes to traverse the distance to the Earth.  But most photons miss.

After all that time, they miss.  Not very bright after all.

Answer 8

It actually takes a million years for light to reach the Earth.  In the Suns core, the pressure and heat in the core fuses hydrogen together into helium.  When hydrogen atoms fuse, it creates a photon of light.  The photon then starts its journey to the surface of the Sun.  With all the atoms in the Sun, the photon starts up towards the surface but continuously bumps into the atoms which sometimes knocks the photon up towards the surface and sometimes knocks it back down towards the core.  The journey to the surface of being bumped up and down takes each photon up to a million years to finally reach the surface where it then travels 8 minutes through space to reach the Earth.  So even though it takes light 8 minutes to reach Earth, it in fact takes light a million years from leaving the core where the photon of light is formed to when it finally reaches Earth.

Answer 9

A "ray of sunshine" takes only a little over 8 minutes, or so, to actually reach the earth.  After it has traveled through the sun, it takes a very little time to strike the Earth.

Answer 10

I was going to say that.

Answer 11

It takes the sun's light about 8 minutes to reach the earth.

Answer 12

About 8 minutes.