In order to see the sun, light needs to travel from the sun, through space, to our eyes. The Earth orbits the sun distance at a distance of about 150 million km. Light travels at about 300,000 km/s. So, by dividing these, you get that light from the sun takes 500 seconds to get to the Earth – roughly eight minutes 20 seconds. This means that if the sun were to suddenly vanish, we wouldn’t know for eight minutes!