Spinning Stars Slow Down With Age
Careful astronomical observations of the spin rate of distant stars is revealing their age.
Images and data gathered by NASA's Kepler spacecraft have enabled astronomers, including Dr. Soren Meibom from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to determine the age of some stars within a 2.5- billion-year-old cluster.
The new information - including the spin-rate and mass of 30 stars examined - has been compared to what we already know about our own Sun, to help figure out their age. Similar to our Sun, stars spin at a slower rate and lose mass as they get older.
Knowing a star's age is relevant to the search for signs of habitable planets, like the Earth. Those planets will be the same age as the stars they orbit; and life is most likely to exist on planets that are not too old and not too young.
Related Links
- Paper in Nature
- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics release
- BBC news story