The Spin of a Star Reveals Its Age

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."

Comments

Re:Calculations are not direct observations.

[empiricistrob]

That's not even remotely right.

Here's how science works (as it applies to astronomy):
- You form a hypothesis. In the case of astronomy this would most likely be a concrete mathematical model.
- Your model has predictions which you test.
- If the predictions are valid you look for more ways of testing the model. If not, you scratch it.

Observing the creation and death of one star is *not* necessary to test these models. There are an astronomical(!) number of stars to observe. You have plenty of stars in different stages of development to test the model with.

Certainly the model could be wrong, even if the data are consistent with it, but that does not make it unscientific.