This process produces photons which, in order to be seen as light, need to make their way out of the core of the sun to the surface before they can begin their 8 minute journey from the sun’s surface to your eyes on earth.
“The core is the only location in the Sun that produces an appreciable amount of heat via fusion: the rest of the star is heated by energy that is transferred outward from the core. All of the energy produced by fusion in the core must travel through many successive layers to the solar photosphere before it escapes into space as sunlight or kinetic energy of particles.“(source)However, these photons can’t just travel in a straight line from the sun’s core to it’s surface because there’s a lot of “stuff” in the way. Photons travel at around 300,000 kilometers a second but when they run into another charged particle they are absorbed and re-emitted in another direction. Because the sun is huge and it’s core is really dense any given photon is going to be re-emitted in all directions many many many times before it finally makes a break for the surface. Think of it kind of like a giant pinball game where the table is tilted so that the ball has to roll UPHILL in order to escape.
Estimates on the distance between charged particles in the sun vary from .01 cm in the core to about .3 cm at the surface so estimates on photon transit time vary widely however even the most gracious estimates top out at around 10,000 years which is too old for YEC.
http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2007/loc…t_sunlight.php
Now, to be sure, this argument shows that sunlight is too old for a YEC framework and doesn’t directly speak to the age of the actual sun beyond the obvious implication that it’s gotta be older than 10,000 years. To calculate the age of the sun involves using other techniques,
“The Sun’s current main sequence age, determined using computer modelsstellar evolution and nucleocosmochronology, is thought to be about 4.57 billion years.“(source)
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