From the perspective of the photon, this all happens more or less instantaneously. Or so I have been told. I was also told that my tongue has 5 or 6 zones where different aspects of flavor are detected and I now know that to be wrong. So maybe fuck your ice cream.
more or less instantaneously
That’s relativity. The faster a thing goes the slower time runs for them. Photons are travelling at light speed and so they don’t experience time at all
Photons don’t gather energy and they definitely don’t move slowly through the sun.
- They’re traveling in a medium, so they move slower than in space
- Due to the random walk caused by multiple scattering, it can take millions of years for a photon to escape the sun after being produced in the core.
You are right that they don’t gather energy, but they do multiply. What would be a single high energy x ray in the core will eventually downscatter into an army of optical photons.
It can definitely take millions of years for photons to leave a star due to dense protons causing collisions.
https://futurism.com/photons-million-year-journey-center-sun
I get what you’re saying but taking a long time is not the same as moving slowly
Slowly making their way does not equal moving slowly. It describes the time it takes to exit the sun, not the speed of the particle.
