Stars and a 6000 year old universe.

Since there are a very large number of stars that are binaries with known orbits, there are already masses accurately calculated for many hundreds of stars by using the rules Kepler and Newton (both Creationists! ) set forth. And lots of 'em weigh more than our sun does.I like the analogy of sitting on a high point at the end of a long, flat, straight stretch of road, watching the semi-trailers go off into the night. The taillights get dimmer and smaller-looking as they get further away. There is very, very little evidence for a YEC-style scenario where the big trucks turn into Tonkas and then into Matchbox trucks so that they can fade and shrink like that. Distance really is the more parsimonious explanation. Just like it is for spectral class G dwarf stars looking bright when they're 150,000,000 km away, and dim when they're 500 light years away, and really dim at 10,000 LY.

That may be part of why astronomers don't use "light year" much, but prefer parsec. That unit is based on plain ol' trigonometry.

The closer stars, Sirius for example, don't have any real opportunity for much of anything massive to be between them and us. And they also move over time relative to background stars (and us): only if some unseen mass moved along with them would the parallax - the triangle - stay warped the same way. And then we have thousands of parallaxes on stars out to 100 parsecs or so, and 1) members of clusters have very similar "triangles" and 2) stars whose spectra show them to be very similar are appropriately bright for their trigonometric distances. It would take a very devious gravitational field to make that happen all over the sky.And then we have a different sort of trigonometric measurement, one of 25,000,000 light years=eight million parsecs, to the galaxy Messier 106. (not English "more messy, but a Frenchman's name....) One side of a central disc is approaching us, and the other side receding, and we know how fast by the Doppler effect, exactly like that cop knows how fast you're driving. Then they used a radiotelescope to see how far, angularly, across the front of the disc several radio-emitting clouds moved over a few years. Those data and high-school trig gave the distance.It's a big place out there.