Age of the universe

@AverageJoe1 said
Tell this neophyte, how in the HELL does sun just burn and burn, keep on burning. Should it not have burned up by now.? I googled it has been burning 4.5 B YEARS!

@divegeester
He wants it spoon fed so he can make it look like he is actually interested which he is not.

@sonhouse said
@AverageJoe1
I gather you never took a single science class in high school. Do you know just what Einstein's equation E=MC^2 is all about?
Ever hear of the word in physics called fusion? Is that maybe a tiny hint as to what is going on inside the sun, why it has been burning for billions of years and will keep on burning for at least another billion years? Energy= Mass (in ...[text shortened]... owed how much heat energy is given off by electricity running through a resistance, like a resistor.

@AverageJoe1
I hope you do understand it is fusion that gives the sun so much power, the same fusion that happens with a fusion bomb as opposed to a fission bomb which is what destroyed Nagasaki.
Fusion bomb works the exact opposite as fission, where neutrons crack open a uranium atom and that releases energy but way less pound for pound as fusion.
Fusion works on the other end of the AMU spectrum, like hydrogen and helium, both very light atoms, as opposed to plutonium or uranium which has AMU (Atomic Mass Unit) of 239 and the like where helium clocks in at 4. Or hydrogen, 2 if a molecule and 1 if it is a single hydrogen atom flying through space.
So if you ram two hydrogen atoms together with enough energy, they shoot out a LOT of energy and make helium in the process.
H2 plus H2 =H4(helium) and a BUNCH of energy.

@divegeester said
Given that time itself is relative to each observers and is dependent on relative velocity through space and the effect of mass proximity, and considering that all mass bodies are moving away from each other at increasing speeds; how then can we, from our observer perspective, be sure that our estimate of the age of the universe is correct?

@Metal-Brain
Well then, it should compliment your Phd if you write up a paper about it and have it published in Nature or some such.

@sonhouse
The work has already been done.
Look up Methuselah star.

YouTube&t=727s

Judging the distance of a star is not an easy thing to do. Nobody really knows how old the universe is because we cannot tell how distant stars are away from us. The speed of stars rotating around a galaxy is also probably inaccurate. People need to realize that it is hard to measure these things accurately. People tend to assume scientists know what they are talking about when they measure these things and their numbers are accurate.

Scientists do not have good careers by being honest and saying they could be wrong. People should ask them how much they could be off in their measurements. They might start to be honest about their assertions.

@Metal-Brain
I gather you don't look very deeply into these measurements.
They ALWAYS give a number with plus and minus error bars.
They NEVER say the distance to star A is 2.4444456 light years away.
They ALWAYS say it is 4.33 within say 10% or whatever error bar they say.
It sounds to me like you want the distance to be within a centimeter or some such which will NEVER happen, at least not in THIS century.

So tell me what your bitch is.

@sonhouse said
@Metal-Brain
I gather you don't look very deeply into these measurements.
They ALWAYS give a number with plus and minus error bars.
They NEVER say the distance to star A is 2.4444456 light years away.
They ALWAYS say it is 4.33 within say 10% or whatever error bar they say.
It sounds to me like you want the distance to be within a centimeter or some such which will NEVER happen, at least not in THIS century.

So tell me what your bitch is.

@Metal-Brain
If you read popular mechanics or some regular magazine they would say Alpha Centauri is 4.33 light years away, they will not put in error bars so if that is your bitch it just proves you don't go to actual science journals so don't blame science for that lack of your understanding.

@sonhouse

How old is the Methuselah star?

@Metal-Brain
I don't give a rats ass how old that star is. Do you not understand the concept of error bars? Like a number, whatever it represents, say 20 feet plus or minus one foot, would be accurate to about 90 percent.
Your obsession with absolute accuracy shows clearly just how stupid you really are not understanding simple statistics. This is not rocket science.

@sonhouse said
@Metal-Brain
I don't give a rats ass how old that star is. Do you not understand the concept of error bars? Like a number, whatever it represents, say 20 feet plus or minus one foot, would be accurate to about 90 percent.
Your obsession with absolute accuracy shows clearly just how stupid you really are not understanding simple statistics. This is not rocket science.

@Metal-Brain
Which just shows how stupid you really are.
You cannot think there could be for instance other universes that impinges on ours where the outer edge of another universe could bump into ours and that old star could in fact be just an incursion from another older universe but you cannot think in those kind of terms and BTW I am not saying we think that is exactly what is happening, just showing there can be alternative explanations.
Open your mind for a change and don't just go IMPOSSIBLE.
The universe can be more complex than we can even imagine right now.

@Metal-Brain said
I brought that up in a previous thread on here. My point was that to know how old the universe is you must know how big it is and if you can’t see the whole universe that is impossible to know.
Ask if we can see the edges of the universe. If the answer is no we don’t know how big the universe is so determining the age is impossible