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aromantic person bringing an accelerator mass spectrometer to their date because they want to do carbon dating

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@charlotte i'm aroace and i have no idea how carbon dating or a accelerator mass spectrometre works.

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@cardboard so like basically, all living (or formerly living) things contain significant amounts of carbon.

this carbon exists in multiple variants, that weigh different amounts.

there is a very small amount of comparatively heavy and radioactive carbon all around us. the percentage of it stays relatively constant for living things due to eating, breathing, pooping, shedding, etc

however once you die, you no longer exchange carbon with the environment. the radioactive carbon in your body will decay slowly over time, meaning it will become less

accelerator mass spectrometry can measure the mass of the carbon. the idea is basically “if you throw a heavy ball and a light ball with the same strength, the heavy ball will land closer to you than the light ball”. by doing this to the carbon in the sample, you can determine how much of the radioactive carbon is in there, and estimate how old it is

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