I read recently that our way of dating the solar system, earth etc is not good because radiocarbon dating?

Question

half life only goes back that far. ( I am not good in science, but I love to study archeology and astronomy). I don't quite understand what I read because I'm no where near an expert about this, but what it was saying was the way our dates were counted, 4.6 billion years may not be correct because I think it said the half life could only go that far. So does that mean that the beginning of our Solar System and Earth could actually be much older. I hope this makes sense to someone out there.
Thanks so much.

Thank you for all the good answers. I appreciate it. So, if I understand this correctly, we can measure the earth's beginnings, from, for example, uranium-238 even if it went back 9 billion years (4.5 half life x's 2) Is that correct? Thank you very much for any help. I love to try to understand new things-or at least new to me. lol

Answer 1

Radio-dating with carbon uses the facts that:
1- Carbon-14 (a radio active isotope of Carbon) is always present in a constant proportion in the air (it is caused by high energy rays from space turning Nitrogen-14 into Carbon-14). Living things absorb carbon (including the known ratio of Carbon-14).
2. Carbon-14 breaks down with a known half-life. This half-life is 5,730 years. As soon as the living object dies, the ratio of Carbon-14 begins to drop from the known ratio in the air. If you can observe the difference, you can estimate how long ago the thing lived (could be wood from a table that, at one time, was a tree).

Problem is that 5,730 years is way too short for Carbon-14 to be useful to measure things further back than, let us say, 60,000 years.

Obviously, we cannot use Carbon dating for the origin of the planet. There were no living things then and any carbon-14 from that era would be all gone.

There are other radioactive atoms present on Earth that have a much longer half-life. For example, Uranium-238 with a half-life of 4.5 billion years.

The fact that Carbon-14 cannot be used to date the origin of the solar system has been known for a long time. Any estimate done in the last decades were NOT done using Carbon-14.

Answer 2

Radiocarbon dating *is* only accurate so far back in time, then it becomes unreliable (less than 1 million years). BUT there are other radioactive isotopes that have much longer half-lives. Some of these isotopes are used to determine ages into the billions of years. There are also specific *ratios* of certain related isotopes that help narrow down long-time ages.

Radiocarbon is generally used to date living (or once-living) things, while those other isotopes are used to date rocks (non-living things).

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Answer 3

Carbon-14 dating is not at all effective in determining the age of Earth, sun, etc.,. Carbon-14 dating is *only* effective when organic samples are available, like trees, fossils, etc.,. When Earth first formed there was *no* organic material anywhere on or in it. Two other dating techniques are used -- potassium-argon dating, and fission-track dating.

Answer 4

A minority say that adsorption rates changed at some point. The majority say it has always been the same. Half life is not the issue here. Keep reading.