Transcript:

We are coming up on a beautiful sunrise on a frosty morning on the East Coast of the United States.

The sunlight that we are seeing today, the photons, were generated in the sun not eight minutes ago. No, no, no. It takes eight minutes for the light to reach us. But the photons were generated in a fusion reaction of hydrogen fusing to helium more than a hundred thousand years ago. Yeah.

The fusion reaction produces energy that is radiated into space in two forms. One of them is neutrinos, which exit the sun almost right away. The other way is the photon. And the photon takes one hundred thousand years to exit from the centre of the sun, out to its surface, and out into space. One hundred thousand years.

So the photon that we are about to see in the sunrise is one hundred thousand years old, not eight minutes old.