Sunlight takes about eight minutes to reach Earth.

Light travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second, but the distance from the Sun to Earth — roughly 150 million kilometers, defined as one astronomical unit — is large enough that even light takes real, measurable time to cross it: about 8 minutes and 20 seconds.

That means the sunlight warming your skin right now left the Sun’s surface over eight minutes ago, and if the Sun somehow vanished this instant, Earth would keep receiving its light and gravitational pull for those same eight-plus minutes before anything appeared to change. The effect is far more dramatic for light from other stars, some of which left their source thousands or millions of years before it ever reaches our eyes.