How does light travel through the vacuum of space from the sun?

Have a science test ........

light takes public transportation, its more efficient and has a lower carbon footprint.

Go, Al Gore!

...at max speed

It radiates.

There are 3 kinds of energy transport, conduction, like in a wire, convenction, like wind, and radiation, like light. Only radiation does not require any matter to transmit. It simply moves through empty space.

It propagates through space using an electromagnetic field.

A wave is a disturbance in a medium. For example, when you make a sound you shake a molecule, then the one next to it shakes, then the one next to it.. until the shake reaches the other person's eardrum.

The problem is that in vacuum there aren't any molecules..
But light travels by "shaking" electromagnetic fields. You can't see them, but there are fields everywhere (like the one that makes a compass magically point to the north*. You can't see it, but it moves the needle!)

So light "shakes" (changes) a small part of such a field, and that "shakes" the next small part, and so forth.




* nitpicking: the field that moves the compass' needle is a magnetic field.
An ELECTROmagnetic field is a combination of an electric field and a magnetic field.

Light is the energy emitted from the source like the sun. You see the light when some object reflects the light to your eye or you directly looking at the source.
The light travel in the vacuum space is the same like the spaceship travel in the vacuum space with no air resistance.

It travels as photons and EM wave. Those waves don't need a medium through which to travel.

I'm going by memory here from my days in Junior High. Light is known as an electromagnetic wave. Meaning there is an electric field. Then perpendicular to it, there is a magnetic field. And then perpendicular to the magnetic field, there is an electric field, and so on and so forth, and the electric field and the magnetic field in essence plays leapfrog. And neither one needs a medium, such as a gas, to travel.

OR, in simpler terms, light is a type of radiation, and radiation is defined as energy that travels in a wave like form. And that can travel through a vacuum.