It is my understanding that for something to be scientific fact it has to be repeatable and observable.
How is the age of a star able to be proved scientifically?
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> It is my understanding that for something to be scientific fact it has to be repeatable and observable.
There isn’t really widespread agreement on what makes something scientific. If science were limited to things that can be repeatedly observed in controlled experiments, then we wouldn’t be able to make any scientific claims about other stars, or evolution, or ancient civilizations, or any large-scale social or economic phenomena.
Ages of stars are based on a combination of observations, inference, and modelling. We know that they emit radiation with spectra that match that of light that has passed through a sample of hydrogen on earth. We can model a big ball of hydrogen and see that it would behave in a similar way to stars. We can model how this big ball of hydrogen changes over time. We can match different stages of this process, for different sizes of hydrogen balls, to the different kinds of stars we can see. There have been various attempts to come up with alternative models (e.g. models in which stars have a small outer layer of hydrogen but are mostly made up of something else) but none of these have worked very well.
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