We use low-degree acoustic modes obtained by the BiSON to estimate the main-sequence age t _ { \odot } of the Sun .
The calibration is accomplished by linearizing the deviations from a standard solar model the seismic frequencies of which are close to those of the Sun .
Formally , we obtain the preliminary value t _ { \odot } = 4.68 \pm 0.02 Gy , coupled with an initial heavy-element abundance Z = 0.0169 \pm 0.0005 .
The quoted standard errors , which are not independent , are upper bounds implied under the assumption that the standard errors in the observed frequencies are independent .