The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, usually quoted as roughly 4.5 billion years.

Quick Scoop

  • The best current estimate for the Sun’s age is about 4.6 billion years, derived from the ages of the oldest meteorites and models of how the solar system formed.
  • NASA educational materials often round this to “4.5 billion years” when explaining it for a general audience.
  • The Sun and the rest of the solar system formed at essentially the same time from a single collapsing cloud of gas and dust, so dating ancient space rocks gives a good estimate of the Sun’s age.

In short: when you ask “how old is the Sun?”, you are really asking “how long ago did our whole solar system come together?” The answer is about 4.6 billion years.

TL;DR: The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, usually rounded to 4.5 billion years in popular explanations.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.