How did we determine that the sun is ~4.6 billions years old?

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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?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The solar system formed 4.5 billion years ago. We know this from radiometric dating of the oldest rocks. We assume the sun ignited at about the same time.

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