In this lesson you focused on the following questions:

  • What is a half-life?
  • How are half-lives used to determine age?

In this lesson you learned that the half-life of a radioactive isotope is defined as the amount of time it takes for half of the radioactive nuclei to decay.  Graphing the amount of parent nuclei versus time gives the following mathematical expression for the number of original parent nuclei in a radioactive sample after a given time interval.






Both the graphical representation and the mathematical expression can be used to determine the age of a radioactive sample.  Radioactive dating is based on comparing the remaining amount of parent nuclei to the amount that was originally in the sample.  Using this and the known half-life of the material, it is possible to accurately determine its age.

 

Assignment 18

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