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
Astronomers can see stars similar to ours in various stages of life. By comparing stuff like size, luminosity, and frequency distribution of the light emitted from these stars to our own, they can know by the of our sun what stage of its life it is in and thus the approximate age of it.
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