The Spin of a Star Reveals Its Age 67
eldavojohn writes "Some soon-to-be-published research on gyrochronology has yielded a possible method for more accurately determining a star's age. While determining the age of stars in clusters has been done using the patterns of its color and brightness, singular stars are much more difficult. By comparing established age information from clusters and analyzing the spin of stars, the researchers have established a defined relationship between color (mass), spin and age giving them the beginning of a guide of 'stellar clocks.' This was accomplished after four painstaking years of collecting data from 71 single dwarf members of the open cluster NGC6811 and establishing a model using data from Kepler."
Re:Seems commonsense in retrospect. (Score:4, Funny)
That makes sense if you know the stars initial spin. I'm curious how that is known.
Well, in the case of Madonna, we were able to look at her early videos. Based on this, we calculated her age as 1.1873 x 10^16 years.
[insert Big Bang joke here]