Kepler is taking the discovery of exoplanets to a whole new level it seems, they are now using it to discover the age of stars....
http://kepler.nasa.gov/news/nasakepl...ews&NewsID=129
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“A star’s rotation slows down steadily with time, like a top spinning on a table, and can be used as a clock to determine its age,” says astronomer Søren Meibom of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
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Knowing a star’s age is important for many astronomical studies and in particular for planet hunters. With the bountiful harvest from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft (launched in 2009) adding to previous discoveries, astronomers have found nearly 2,000 planets orbiting distant stars. Now, they want to use this new zoo of planets to understand how planetary systems form and evolve and why they are so different from each other.
“Ultimately, we need to know the ages of the stars and their planets to assess whether alien life might have evolved on these distant worlds,” says Meibom. “The older the planet, the more time life has had to get started. Since stars and planets form together at the same time, if we know a star’s age, we know the age of its planets too.”
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