Samarium-146 Half-Life 30 Percent Shorter So How Long Did It Take Our Solar System To Form?
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 - 11:01
in Paleontology & Archaeology
Our solar system is around 4.5 billion years old but its difficult to know how long it took to form. The reason is, basically, our clocks. Establishing chronologies of past events or determining ages of objects require having clocks that 'tick' at different paces - nuclear clocks used for dating,are based on the rate of decay of an atomic nucleus expressed by a half-life, which is the time it takes for half of a number of nuclei to decay, a property of each nuclear species. Radiocarbon dating is the most famous. It was invented in Chicago in the late 1940s and can date artifacts back to prehistoric times because the half-life of radiocarbon (carbon-14) is a few thousand years. read more