How to Gauge the Age of a Star? It's all in its Spin : DNews — news.discovery.com

Keeping accurate time and determining age are two crucial, constant goals in science. In the 1700s the proof and construction of an elegant, precise maritime clock opened up much more safe and efficient ocean exploration and provided a way forward for more accurate mapping on Earth. Before then, mariners and astronomers alike, were both, literally, at sea. Likewise, until now, determining the age of stars has been equivalent only to saying that a person is young or old, and our guesses of someone’s age are typically off by as much as 15 percent. But by building on the work of others (as it goes in science) and carefully working out for over a decade how to construct a “clock” to measure the ages of stars, Sydney Barnes, of the Leibniz-Institut fuer Astophysik Potsdam (AIP), Germany, derived an elegant and extraordinary method he named “gyrochronology” to derive a star’s age from its spin rate and its mass.

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