The age of stars has been pinned down to the speed their spin

Astronomers have confirmed that the age of the stars can be determined by how fast they spin.

17:20 06 January 2015

For the first time, a US team of astronomers has found the way to accurately measure the age of the star – through their spin speed. The finding resolves a long-standing challenge, allowing astronomers to estimate the star’s age to within 10per cent.

The discovery was published in the journal Nature and was presented in Seattle at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Senior author Dr Soren Meibom from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said:
Stars “act as lamp posts, lighting up even the oldest parts of our galaxy.”

"A cool star spins very fast when it's young, but just like a top on a table it gets slower and slower as the star grows older.”

"These new data show, with real observations, that this is on solid ground."

"We can get age as accurately as about 10% from this method."

Ruth Angus, a PhD student researching gyrochronology at the University of Oxford, said the results were "a really big deal" for the field.

"More evidence has been slowly accumulating that lots of stars do seem to follow this pattern, but how reliably stars fall onto this relation is a bit of an unknown," Ms Angus told the BBC.

"This cluster will certainly help with our understanding of how good gyrochronology is as a method, and how valid it is.

"It shows that these stars are doing what they're expected to do, and everything's peachy."