Space
The sunlight hitting you right now left the Sun about eight minutes ago.
Light travels at roughly 300,000 kilometres per second, and the Sun is about 150 million kilometres away. The trip takes eight minutes and twenty seconds.
Why is this true?
If the Sun vanished, we would keep seeing it for those eight minutes. The light from the nearest star beyond the Sun takes over four years to reach us, and from some visible stars, thousands of years.
More facts in this category
More about space
Space facts are mostly a lesson in scale. Days longer than years, storms wider than Earth, light that left its star before the pyramids existed — the numbers stop being intuitive very quickly. Every entry here comes from established astronomy and includes a short explanation of what causes the effect, so the fact holds up when someone asks the obvious follow-up question at the dinner table.