I love astronomy stuff, not an expert at all, but have always been so fascinated by it. I am totally baffled by how we seem to claim that we can approximate how long the sun has been around. Like the margin of error for a number like that is crazy…. totally incomprehensible to me. Say that we are 25% off, that means we are over 1 billion years off. So, how do people confidently claim that the sun is 4.6 billion years, rather than 3 billion or 10 billion?
In: 1140
I think you are getting at multiple different questions here.
* What is the age of the sun?
* How do we know?
* What is our margin of error?
* How do people confidently claim a precise number with such a huge margin of error?
Each one of the questions is difficult to give a good eli5, but the philosophical questions about “how do we know what we know, and who do we trust?” are at the center of science.
We have put systems in place to help us know who to trust, and when, and to help find error.
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