Radioactive materials have half lives of millions or billions of years. How do we know the...

Radioactive materials have half lives of millions or billions of years. How do we know the value of these half lives (since none of us have been around that long)? Explain.

Expert Solution

Ans- Let us understand this by taking a radioactive material Uranium which has half life of 4.5 billion years.

So in the case of ²³⁸U and some other long-lived radionuclides, one approach that has been used is to separate a pure sample of the radionuclide in a known chemical form, weigh the sample, and then measure the activity, A (disintegration rate). The half-life is then determined from the fundamental definition of activity as the product of the radionuclide decay constant, λ, and the number of radioactive atoms present, N.

One solves for λ and gets the half-life from the relationship λ = ln2/T1/2.

queen_honey_blossom answered 2 years ago

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