BOSTON, Jan. 6 (UPI) — Researchers at Harvard say they’ve come up with a better way to date stars. Many of the glowing spheres of plasma that light the cosmos — especially small, cool-burning ones — hide their age well. But new research suggests a star’s spin rate can provide an accurate estimation of its age.
As Soren Meibom, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, explained at a press conference at this week’s meeting of the American Astronomical Society, stars slow down as they age. Meibom is the lead author of a new paper on the aging technique, published this week in the journal Nature.
“We have found that the relationship between mass, rotation rate and age is now defined well enough by observations that we can obtain the ages of individual stars to within 10 percent,” study co-author Sydney Barnes, a researcher at the the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, explained at the AAS press conference.
But how can astronomers tell how fast a star several thousand light-years away is spinning? The answer is — NASA’s Kepler spacecraft.
Kepler has allowed astronomers to observe the sunspots on distant stars, its ultra precise instruments able to pick up even the slightest dimming. By tracking the time it takes for a sunspot to reappear, scientists can calculate its spin rate — and thus determine its age.
“Now we can derive precise ages for large numbers of cool field stars in our Galaxy by measuring their spin periods,” Meibom said. “This is an important new tool for astronomers studying the evolution of stars and their companions, and one that can help identify planets old enough for complex life to have evolved.”
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