the.com/sunlight
a few minutes old by the time it touches you, ancient before it leaves.
means The visible light that travels from the sun and illuminates the Earth, whether streaming directly or filtered through cloud.
from A plain compound of two of English's oldest building blocks: "sun," from Old English "sunne" (a cousin of German "Sonne" and Latin "sol"), and "light," from Old English "lēoht," both tracing back to Proto-Germanic and ultimately Proto-Indo-European roots. The word does exactly what such honest compounds do — it bolts "sun" to "light" and trusts you to understand, a join old enough that no one remembers making it.
- travel time
- reaches Earth in about eight minutes
- escape ordeal
- photons take millennia to exit the Sun's core
- weight gain
- sunlight exerts measurable pressure on objects
- vitamin factory
- your skin makes vitamin D from it
- true color
- the Sun is actually white, not yellow
solar constant — 1,361 watts per square meter of earth's upper atmosphere, measured by satellites since 1978
analemma — figure-8 path the sun traces across the sky over a year due to earth's axial tilt and orbital eccentricity