3 ms·

Does this mean that carbon dating isn't as accurate as they thought if this is true?

• Eliezer 18y ago
  I hope this is a joke, based on the roughly 3000 times this question was asked and answered "No!" on Slashdot. It's also pretty unlikely to be true, I understand the correlation involved was weak, imperfect and not precisely timed.
  • pmorici 18y ago
    No, I don't regularly read slashdot and no one asked the question here yet so... I don't find it surprising though that that is the first question that would pop into most peoples heads as dating is the most popularly know use of decay measurements.
• rglovejoy 18y ago
  Unlikely. The distance between the Earth and the Sun varies throughout the year, but it all evens out. When you are trying to figure out the age of a sample that may be thousands of years old, these variations are just noise and nothing significant. What would be interesting is how the decay rate on the nuclear generators aboard Pioneers 10 & 11 and Voyagers 1 & 2 have varied as they traveled away from the Sun over the past 30-40 years. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen...