Today’s interesting fact has to do with light from the sun and why certain disaster movies make no sense.

We live on the earth courtesy of the light and heat we receive from the sun.

There have been several disaster movies about the sun shutting down, and that life giving light stopping.

The light that comes from the sun is generated by several means.

One source is the ionised atoms in the outer shell of the Sun.

Interactions between these ions generate photons, which escape the sun providing light.

Another source is the atomic furnace deep within the sun. Hydrogen atoms fuse and the result generates heat and light.

The heat creates the gigantic convection currents that roll through the sun, spreading the heat and creating the ionised atoms that generates some of our light.

The photons generated from fusion travels in a random direction. We are told that in general it will travel at the speed of light on average about 2 cm before it gets absorbed by another atom.

The atom that absorbs the photon will then release a photon, in a random direction only to be absorbed by another atom.

It is estimated that it will take about a million years before the average photon created by fusion leaves the surface of the sun.

In the disaster movies, fusion stops, the sun stops shining, and intrepid astronauts go to the sun, and using our nuclear weapons, restart the sun.

But if the sun stopped fusion, it would take a million years before it started to dim so I doubt we would notice the process had stopped.

And if we restarted the sun's fusion, it could take a million years before it started to shine at the same levels as it does now.

So those movies are not based on facts, and we can stop worrying about the sun going out.