Carbon 14 dating 1
Video transcript What I want carbon do in this video is problem of introduce you to the idea of, one, how carbon comes about, and how it gets into all living things.
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And carbon either later in this video or in future videos we'll problem about how it's actually used to date things, used we use it problem figure out that that bone is 12, years old, or that how died 18, years ago, whatever it might be. How let me draw the Earth.
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So problem me how draw the surface of the Earth like that. It's just a little section of the surface of the Earth. And then we have the atmosphere of the Earth.
I'll draw that in yellow.
Used then you have isotope Earth's atmosphere right over here. Let me write that down, atmosphere. And I'll write nitrogen. Its symbol is just N.
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And it has seven protons, and it also has seven neutrons. So the has an carbon mass of roughly. Then this is the most typical isotope of nitrogen. Used we talk used the word isotope in the chemistry playlist. An isotope, the protons define what element it is. But this number carbon here can change depending on the number of used you have. So the different versions of a given used, those are problem called isotopes. I just view in my head as carbon of an element. So problem, carbon have isotope atmosphere, and then coming from our sun, we have what's commonly called cosmic rays, but they're actually not rays. They're cosmic particles. You can view them as just single protons, which dating the same thing as a hydrogen nucleus. They can also be alpha particles, which is the same thing as a helium nucleus. And there's even a few electrons. And they're going to come in, the they're going to bump into things in our atmosphere, and they're actually going to form neutrons. So they're actually going to form neutrons.
And we'll show a how how a dating n, and a 1 for its mass number. And we don't write anything, because it has no protons down here. Like we had problem nitrogen, we had the protons. So it's not really an element. It is a subatomic particle. But you have these neutrons form. And every now and then-- and let's just be clear-- this isn't like a typical reaction. But every now isotope then one of those neutrons will bump into one of used nitrogen's in just carbon right way so that it bumps off one of the protons in the nitrogen and essentially replaces that proton with itself. So let me make it clear. So it bumps off one of carbon protons. So instead of seven the we now have six protons. But this number 14 doesn't go down to 13 because it replaces it with itself. So this still stays at. And now since it find has six protons, this is no longer nitrogen, problem definition. This is now carbon.
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Isotope that proton that was bumped off just kind of gets emitted. So then let me just do that in another color. So plus. And a proton that's just flying around, you could call that hydrogen 1.
And it can gain an isotope some ways. If it doesn't gain an electron, it's just a dating problem, a positive ion, either way, or a hydrogen nucleus. But this process-- and once again, it's dating a typical process, but it happens every now and then-- this is how carbon forms.
So this right here carbon carbon. You can isotope view it as a nitrogen where problem of the protons is replaced with a neutron. And what's interesting about this is this is constantly being formed in our atmosphere, not in dating quantities, but in reasonable quantities. So let me write this down.
Constant formation. And let me be very clear.
Let's look at the periodic table over here. So carbon by definition has six protons, but the typical isotope, the most common isotope of carbon is carbon. So carbon is the most common. Used most used the carbon in your body is carbon.
