Guessing your age might be a popular carnival game, but for astronomers it’s a real challenge to determine the ages of stars. Once a star like our Sun has
settled into steady nuclear fusion, or the mature phase of its life, it changes little for billions of years. One exception to that rule is the star’s rotation period – how quickly it spins. By measuring the rotation periods of hundreds of thousands of stars, NASA’sStars are born spinning rapidly. However, stars of our Sun’s mass or smaller will gradually slow down over billions of years.
This image of our Sun was taken in August 2012 by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It shows a number of sunspots. Other stars also experience starspots, which cause the star’s observed brightness to vary as the spots rotate in and out of view. By measuring those changes in brightness, astronomers can infer the star’s rotation period.
A star can have dozens of spots scattered across its surface at any one time, causing irregular brightness fluctuations that make it difficult to tease out periodic signals of dimming due to the star’s rotation. This graph of data from the butterpy program shows how the observed brightness of a simulated star would vary over a single rotation period.
Stars & Black Holes Goddard Space Flight Center Heliophysics Missions Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Science & Research Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Stars Sunspots TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) The Solar System The Sun The Universe
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