AST 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 20: Uranium-235, Carbon-14, Radionuclide
15 Nov 2016
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Document Summary
Early solar system started as a spinning ball of gas. The process used to figure out the ages of the planets is the same as the process used for more recent objects. Carbon dating : use the radioactive decay of carbon to figure out how old things are. Useful for things up to about 50,000 years old. We can use the decay of other isotopes to age much older things, though like planets: radioactive decay: key points. Each element on the periodic table has a fixed number of protons and electrons. The chemical properties don"t depend on the number of neutrons. It has six protons and six neutrons, for a total of twelve nucleons in the nucleus. A different form of carbon is called carbon-14 . It has six protons and eight neutrons, for a total of fourteen nucleons in the nucleus. These different forms of elements, with different numbers of neutrons, are called isotopes.
