[wongarsu]

There is always an implied "as far as we know". But astronomy has a couple reasons to be fairly certain about many things. We can see a lot of stars, and because light takes time to travel the further away they are the older the state we are observing. We only see each star as it is right now, but from looking at a lot of them you get a good idea of how they can develop. Like how you can get a good idea of how humans age by just looking at a lot of people of different ages; you don't need to follow each of them for 90 years. The other advantage is that most of it is well understood physics that can be reasoned about and simulated. And then we can compare those simulations to what we are observing across the universe to see if our simulations make sense.

[naveen99]

Feels more social than science.

[wongarsu]

Science is forming a testable hypothesis and then testing it. So you hypothesize "as stars accumulate fusion products their cores get heavier and the rate of fusion increases, making them brighter" and test this both with modeling and looking if this matches the stars we can see. How is that now science?

[naveen99]

Models are not stars and very incomplete. They are different stars. Feels like you could drive a supernova through the black holes in the sloppiness.

[wolfendin]

Feels like?

What evidence do you have for the sloppiness and how does the current model fail to explain the deviation in observations?

[beej71]

So do it! :) Then we'll all have some new science to learn.

[naveen99]

Ok. Good explanation. Thanks.