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Solve : Radiocarbon dating -Useful?? |
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Answer» Quote from: Mulreay on September 27, 2009, 09:12:20 PM Anti-carbon um... Carbon dating is based on the decay of radioactive Carbon-14... I don't think there are any radioactive silocon ISOTOPES. Also, Carbon dating is relatively accurate, the TRICKY part is getting an accurate reading of the remaining carbon-14.I was joking about the silicon Also I said not 'exact' so were kind of saying the same thing.it's exact if you get an exact reading. Assuming you know logarithms, of course.Isotopes of silicon From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: NAVIGATION, search Silicon (Si) has numerous known isotopes, with mass numbers ranging from 22 to 44. 28Si (the most abundant isotope, at 92.23%), 29Si (4.67%), and 30Si (3.1%) are stable; 32Si is a radioactive isotope produced by cosmic ray spallation of argon. Its half-life has been DETERMINED to be approximately 170 years (0.21 MeV), and it decays by beta emission to 32P (which has a 14.28 day half-life [1]) and then to 32S. The standard atomic mass is 28.0855(3) uthat's OK, like I said, Quote I don't think there are any radioactive silicon isotopes. On the other hand, Carbon-14 is present in all living THINGS in specific amounts... (can't recall the details) but once they die it will decay. So using the carbon-14 half-life and the remaining carbon-14 it's possible to determine how long something has been dead. the radioactive silicon isotope, however, appears seemingly randomly, and therefore would not be suitable to determine the elapsed time since a silicon-based lifeforms death (although it is entirely possible that another isotope similar to Carbon-14 would be a by-product of it's life processes) |
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