Solved cryptogram
Sunlight needs a little over eight minutes to reach us, so we always see the sun as it was.
Astronomy Facts, sourced to NASA.
What it means
Nothing you look at is seen in the present, but the delay is usually too small to notice. The sun is far enough away that the lag is measurable in minutes rather than nanoseconds. If the sun were somehow to wink out, we would carry on in daylight for another eight minutes and change, and the Earth would keep to its orbit for exactly as long, since gravity travels no faster than light.
The claim comes from NASA, and the page it comes from was read on 2026-08-27 to confirm it still says this.
This is not the kind of claim that goes out of date, which is why it was set as a puzzle rather than a fact with a shelf life.
Solve it yourself
This fact is a cryptogram here: 71 letters over 18 different ones, graded medium.
- SourceNASA
- CollectionAstronomy Facts
- Difficultymedium
- Length71 letters, 18 of them different
Nearby in the collection
The facts either side of this one.
About as hard as this one
Scored closest to it by the model behind our guide to solving cryptograms.