The ages of sun-like stars
Friday, February 6, 2015 - 10:00
in Astronomy & Space
The mass of a star is perhaps its most significant feature. It determines how brightly it shines (a star ten times more massive than the Sun will, during its normal lifetime, shine about forty million times brighter than a star ten times less massive than the Sun), how long it will live (tens of millions of years versus tens of billions of years, respectively, for these two cases), and how it will eventually die (as a supernova or as slowly cooling clump of ashes). The next most significant property of a star is its age, which fixes its current character, the age of its planetary system, and the evolutionary state of its environment, and moreover which can be used to refine details in the theory of how stars evolve.