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
This fact is a doozy for ELI5. It’s built on a large number of astronomical observations, combined with an understanding of gravity, thermodynamics, and atomic and nuclear processes, which in turn were developed by terrestrial physics experiments. Though hypotheses about solar formation pre-date quantum mechanics, its advent in the early 20th century was pivotal in understanding the composition and life cycle of stars, thus allowing a determination of a precise age. A satisfactory answer in my opinion would require much more background, and could easily take up an entire semester of university-level survey course.
Check out the movie Oppenheimer. The movie is less about the actual science, and is primarily a story about a thoughtful and talented man who gains influence because he is instrumental to power, and is ultimately discarded once he’s served his purpose. But there is a backdrop of nuclear physics discoveries taking place in the context of stellar processes. That’s what people like Oppenheimer and Teller were trying to understand, and the knowledge just happened to have other applications (ie the bomb).
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