Energy From the Sun's Core Takes 170,000 Years to Escape

The energy that lights the Sun is made deep inside it, and getting out is slow. NASA explains that energy from the core is carried outward by radiation, which bounces around the radiative zone, taking about 170,000 years to get from the core to the top of the convection zone. From there the journey changes. In the convection zone, large bubbles of hot plasma, a soup of ionized atoms, move upward toward the photosphere, the layer we think of as the Sun’s surface. The core where the energy begins is extreme. NASA gives its temperature as about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit and its density as about 150 grams per cubic centimeter. The interior has three regions in all, the core, the radiative zone and the convection zone, beneath the visible surface and the atmosphere above it.