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
ELI5? Every year the sun celebrates its birthday?
We calculate how old everything else is. Also, Hydrogen becomes other things at a certain rate. We can calculate how much hydrogen there is compared to how much of everything else to figure out more or less how long it’s been burning for. It’s not perfect because the sun could have started with varying amounts of the everything else already there, but it helps give us an upper and lower range.
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