At about 50,000 to 60,000 years, then, the limit of the technique is reached (beyond this time, other radiometric techniques must be used for dating, such as C concentration or residual radioactivity of a sample whose age is not known, it is possible to obtain the number of decay events per gram of carbon.
The boat of a pharaoh was discovered in a sealed crypt and reassembled in a museum near the pyramids (see Fig. The age of our galaxy and earth also can be estimated using radioactive dating.As soon as a plant or animal dies, they cease the metabolic function of carbon uptake; there is no replenishment of radioactive carbon, only decay.Libby, Anderson, and Arnold (Taylor and Aitken ) is the name given to this value, which Libby measured at 5568±30 years. After 10 half-lives, there is a very small amount of radioactive carbon present in a sample.Accelerating the ions to high energy has one more advantage.At the kinetic energies typically used in an AMS system it is possible to use well-established nuclear physics techniques to detect the individual C ions as they arrive at a suitable particle detector.