Explain what happens inside the radiation zone that causes the photon to take so long to exit the sun

1 answer:

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-A photon travels, on average, a particular distance, d, before being briefly absorbed and released by an atom, which scatters it in a new random direction.

-Given d and the speed of light, c, you can figure out the average time step and space step size (how often the photon “steps” and how far it “steps” each time).

-The size of the Sun is figured in terms of step size. Some surprisingly tricky math happens, involving “Brownian motion” and probabilities. Finally,

-The average time it would take to get to the surface of the Sun is found.

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The earliest radio broadcasts on Earth were emitted about 100 years ago. Approximately where are these initial radio waves now?

Gala2k [10]

Answer:

100 ly are $d=9.454255\times10^{17}m$

Explanation:

The speed of light is, by definition (we define this and derive a definition of distance from there nowadays), c=299792458m/s. We want to know, at this speed, how much distance the radio signals travel in 100 years. Since each year has 365 days (not a leap one though), each day has 24 hours, each hour has 60 minutes and each minute has 60 seconds, the number of seconds in a year will be (365)(24)(60)(60)=31536000, so the distance traveled by the waves in 100 years will be:

$d=vt=(299792458m/s)(100)(31536000s)=9.454255\times10^{17}m$ , which, of course, are 100 light years.