Posted on 05/03/2012 3:05:41 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Our solar system is four and a half billion years old, but its formation may have occurred over a shorter period of time than we previously thought, says an international team of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and universities and laboratories in the US and Japan.
Establishing chronologies of past events or determining ages of objects require having clocks that tick at different paces, according to how far back one looks. Nuclear clocks, used for dating, are based on the rate of decay of an atomic nucleus expressed by a half-life, the time it takes for half of a number of nuclei to decay, a property of each nuclear species.
Radiocarbon dating for example, invented in Chicago in the late 1940s and refined ever since, can date artifacts back to prehistoric times because the half-life of radiocarbon (carbon-14) is a few thousand years. The evaluation of ages of the history of earth or of the solar system requires extremely "slow-paced" chronometers consisting of nuclear clocks with much longer half-lives. The activity of one of these clocks, known as nucleus samarium-146 (146Sm), was examined by Michael Paul, the Kalman and Malke Cooper Professor of Nuclear Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as researchers from the University of Notre Dame and the Argonne National Laboratory in the US and from two Japanese universities.
146Sm belongs to a family of nuclear species which were "live" in our sun and its solar system when they were born. Events thereafter, and within a few hundred million years, are dated by the amount of 146Sm that was left in various mineral archives until its eventual "extinction."
146Sm has become the main tool for establishing the time evolution of the solar system over its first few hundred million years. This by itself owes to a delicate geochemical property of the element samarium, a rare element in nature. It is a sensitive probe for the separation, or differentiation, of the silicate portion of earth and of other planetary bodies.
The main result of the work of the international scientists, detailed in a recent article in the journal Science, is a new determination of the half-life of 146Sm, previously adopted as 103 million years, to a much shorter value of 68 million years. The shorter half-life value, like a clock ticking faster, has the effect of shrinking the assessed chronology of events in the early solar system and in planetary differentiation into a shorter time span.
The new time scale, interestingly, is now consistent with a recent and precise dating made on a lunar rock and is in better agreement with the dating obtained with other chronometers.
The measurement of the half-life of 146Sm, performed over several years by the collaborators, involved the use of the ATLAS particle accelerator at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois.
Provided by Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights, dear spirited irish!
Why is God having created the egg not allowed?
Spirited: Now either God spoke or He did not, as evolutionists of every stripe believe. But He did speak, and in His revelations to man God said nothing about cosmic eggs.
Futhermore, it is not for man to allow or disallow God to create cosmic eggs. This arrogant nonsense belongs to egoists.
In science, every proposition is subject to critical assesment and questioning. Do you want theology to be afforded equal treatment in that arena, or not?
LOL! If I had wanted to beep him, I would have.
A choice between two versions of miraculous creation: either the work of The Lord, or, like Topsey, it just growed.
This is key to understanding The Lord’s many admonitions about humility.
How is questioning the age and formation of Earth any more arrogant than questioning whether man can fly, or whether a fungus can be used to fight an infection, or whether a mathematical construct such as a Higgs Boson really exists?
Science is Science. Faith is Faith. Both however are subject to being preyed upon by the hobgoblins of dogmatism.
“In science, every proposition is subject to critical assesment and questioning”
Spirited: Science? What science?!? Chaos, Cosmic Eggs, vast quantities of Chronos fairy-dust, and Trees of Life (process philosophy) rightly belong in a file marked “magic” and “superstition.”
bflr
It makes your head hurt because you’re using it.
Great questions.
You see, you just have to be a little more patient and wait a few billion years and then you too would understand how these liberal clocks work.
So you're basically here just to throw poo at the study of radiometric dating in general?
LOL!
"Are there any Freeper cosmologists who can summarize twenty billion years for me?"
I'm not a cosmologists, but I would summarize with "twenty blinks of an eye."
And this would afflict neither, if they were approached with a little humility.
“So you’re basically here just to throw poo at the study of radiometric dating in general?”
Spirited: And are you not basically here to lead people into belief in a metaphysical system-—”Chaos, Cosmic Eggs, vast quantities of Chronos fairy-dust, and Trees of Life (process philosophy)”—— by deceptively coloring it as empirical science?
As you try to lead people astray keep this in mind at all times: Moments after your body dies your immortal soul will be standing before its Creator and you will be held accountable for what you have done in this world.
No, I'm here to talk about physics. You dragged all the cosmic-egg/fairy dust talk into the conversation.
As you try to lead people astray keep this in mind at all times: Moments after your body dies your immortal soul will be standing before its Creator and you will be held accountable for what you have done in this world.
Then that'll be between Him and I, won't it? Thankfully, I'll be judged on what I've actually done and said, not by words you put into my mouth and motives you falsely claim I have. You get to answer for that when your time comes.
...formation may have occurred over a shorter period of time than we previously thought, says an international team of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and universities and laboratories in the US and Japan.
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...formation may have occurred over a shorter period of time than we previously thought, says an international team of researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and universities and laboratories in the US and Japan.
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The solar system did not evolve. It was created by God.
to determine time based on half life - one must know the amount that existed at the start....they don’t know how much there really was at the start so they “estimate” what they think it was. (it’s a freakin wild assed guess)
Faster then seven days?
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