What is carbone dating?

Answer 1

Do you mean carbon dating? If so, the official definition is "the determination of the age or date of organic matter from the relative proportions of the carbon isotopes carbon-12 and carbon-14 that it contains".

Answer 2

Do you mean carbon dating? If so, the official definition is "the determination of the age or date of organic matter from the relative proportions of the carbon isotopes carbon-12 and carbon-14 that it contains".

Answer 3

Carbon dating is a variety of radioactive dating which is applicable only to matter which was once living and presumed to be in equilibrium with the atmosphere, taking in carbon dioxide from the air for photosynthesis. Cosmic ray protons blast nuclei in the upper atmosphere, producing neutrons which in turn bombard nitrogen, the major constituent of the atmosphere . This neutron bombardment produces the radioactive isotope carbon-14. The radioactive carbon-14 combines with oxygen to form carbon dioxide and is incorporated into the cycle of living things. The carbon-14 forms at a rate which appears to be constant, so that by measuring the radioactive emissions from once-living matter and comparing its activity with the equilibrium level of living things, a measurement of the time elapsed can be made. Presuming the rate of production of carbon-14 to be constant, the activity of a sample can be directly compared to the equilibrium activity of living matter and the age calculated. Various tests of reliability have confirmed the value of carbon data, and many examples provide an interesting range of application. Carbon-14 decays with a halflife of about 5730 years by the emission of an electron of energy 0.016 MeV. This changes the atomic number of the nucleus to 7, producing a nucleus of nitrogen-14. At equilibrium with the atmosphere, a gram of carbon shows an activity of about 15 decays per minute. The low activity of the carbon-14 limits age determinations to the order of 50,000 years by counting techniques. That can be extended to perhaps 100,000 years by accelerator techniques for counting the carbon-14 concentration.

Answer 4

Carbon dating, more accurately radiocarbon dating, is an archeological method of dating organic material by measuring the decay of the carbon-14 isotope remaining in a sample.