rfmcdonald | [BRIEF NOTE] How expectedly if inaccurately Pleidiac (Reply)

Barbara Hand Clow's 1995 The Pleiadean Agenda: A New Cosmology for the Age of Light makes the claim on the back that superior beings in the Pleiades star cluster have been guiding our future for the past "225 million years." A slice of Clow's book is available here, for those who are interested. One problem, though.

Ages for star clusters can be estimated by comparing the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram for the cluster with theoretical models of stellar evolution, and using this technique, ages for the Pleiades of between 75 and 150 million years have been estimated. The spread in estimated ages is a result of uncertainties in stellar evolution models. In particular, models including a phenomenon known as convective overshoot, in which a convective zone within a star penetrates an otherwise non-convective zone, result in higher apparent ages.

Another way of estimating the age of the cluster is by looking at the lowest-mass objects. In normal main sequence stars, lithium is rapidly destroyed in nuclear fusion reactions, but brown dwarfs can retain their lithium. Due to lithium's very low ignition temperature of 2.5 million kelvins, the highest-mass brown dwarfs will burn it eventually, and so determining the highest mass of brown dwarfs still containing lithium in the cluster can give an idea of its age. Applying this technique to the Pleiades gives an age of about 115 million years.

Doubtless the above is just Wikipedia's lies. Really.