How many years does it take for heat generated in the Suns core to?
The energy in the sun’s core comes from fusing hydrogen into helium. Most of the energy emerges in the form of high-speed particles and gamma rays, neither of which can go very far in the dense, hot plasma. This energy moves by a process of conduction through the core, until it reaches less dense regions of the sun, where a process of convection moves the energy through the material. Only in the upper regions of the sun’s surface does the density reach a point where the energy moves by the more familiar (to us) radiation. The time for energy to go from the core of the sun to its surface is about a quarter of a million years. Thus, almost all the energy we see is a display of the activity in the Sun’s core a quarter of a million years ago. But there IS a way to jump the queue and see what is happening in the core. Every fusion reaction in the Sun produces neutrinos, mass-less particles that barely interact with the surrounding matter. These fly off unimpeded by the material around them,
