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Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned.

G

gturner

Admiral
Physicists had assumed that radioactive decay of any particular isotope occurs with a constant half-life that is unaffected by outside influences. But while searching for a good source of random numbers, researchers at Purdue found that decay rates vary. Further investigations found that they vary seasonally with Earth's elliptical orbit around the sun, and more research found a 33-day periodic variation, linked to what is thought to be the rotation rate of the sun's core.

Nobody yet knows what's responsible for the effect, but just knowing about it may prove beneficial. There was a drop in decay rates a day and a half prior to the eruption of a solar flare, so it could provide an early warning system for astronauts on deep-space missions.

full story

Anyway, I suspect the effect is due to midichlorian interactions (the thingies that bind all things together, as revealed in The Phantom Menace.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

It's discoveries like this that make a trekkie's heart go "weeeeeh"!

Can't wait to find out what lies at the bottom of this mystery.

Neutrinos or an unknown particle? Subspace waves?

And just when we think we understood the universe it surprises us again. :)
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

Yes, but geology isn't going to be thrilled to know that their long-term dating methods may have significant and potentially large errors that can't be corrected.

Since this newly observed effect seems to affect all isotopes, different geological decay clocks could all be wrong yet still correlate to one another. I say this because we're observing small changes in decay rate from slight changes in our distance from the sun and the sun's internal rotation, yet hundreds of millions of years ago (not to mention billions) the sun's output was much lower than now.

So the big questions: How did decay rates change during the evolution of the solar system? Are the decay rates significantly different on different planets due to their distance from the sun? What is the mechnism that effects the rates and can we recreate it on Earth, say with a fusion or fission reactor? What if the mechanism depends on a vary odd reaction that occurs in the sun between some isotopes whose long-ago reaction rates in the early sun can't even be guessed at? This potentially means that we will never have a good estimate of the age of the solar system.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

The creationists are gonna love this!
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

^ And what about those pesky astrologists! Oh my!


But seriously, I guess it is time to invent a new way of dating things. I wonder what it will be though.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

Does this mean Proton Packs don't have a half-life of 5,000 years?
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

On second thought, I don't think this will have much affect on dating the solar system since that uses isotopes with very, very long half-lives. Those are almost stable, and since stable atoms don't decay at all and can't be affected by whatever this mechanism is, I would think nearly stable atoms are likewise less affected.

Of course I could be wrong about that, but it seems to make sense that the more unstable isotopes should be easier to push over the edge, and that there might be large differences in isotopes with similar half-lives based on their "unknown particle" cross-section.

If the effect is real and measurable then we should be able to set up experiments with lots and lots of different isotopes to find the ones that make the best detector.

The results of that experiment should provide some ideas about what might be going on, if anything. Then we could perform particle-accelerator experiments to search for high-energy interactions that result in changes in the decay rates of the sensitive isotopes. We could also launch some probes to see how the decay rates change with distance from the sun and if radial position around the sun plays a role (due to some external flux).
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

gturner said:
Yes, but geology isn't going to be thrilled to know that their long-term dating methods may have significant and potentially large errors that can't be corrected.
Click to expand...

Well, geologists have had to compensate for other flaws in carbon dating in the past. That's why radiocarbon dates have been checked to other known dates (like tree ring dating) to go a long period into the past. Obviously, whether or not this impacts the other half (whether or not one object decays faster than the other to the point where they seem the same age). It depends on the variation. If it's something that affects all things equally, it shouldn't matter. It would add a bit more to the margin of error, but that's about it.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

This would affect the whole half life theory. Half life is no more if this is true.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

This is a really cool phenomenon but it's pretty much irrelevant for geological dating, given the tiny magnitude of the effect. You can get a rough idea of the magnitude by considering meteorites, which have spent varying times at varying distances from the sun. If the yearly signal does result from differences in the Earth's distance from the sun, and if the effect is significant for geological dating, meteorites should give significantly different ages. The fact that a variety of meteorites give congruent dates for the age of the solar system suggests that geological dates are off by no more than 1 part per 5000 or 1/10000 (the approximate error range on a 4.5 billion year old U-Pb age). Also, nowhere in the article does it state that all half-lives are affected to the same degree, and it seems extremely improbable that they would all have a similar proportional change.

In terms of our understanding of particle physics, however, this seems pretty monumental - once they figure out the mechanism. It's completely unexpected discoveries like these that are really exciting.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

I'm not really shocked by this. I mean, is it really surprising that atomic decay might be altered by outside forces? Isn't EVERYTHING alterable by outside forces? If anything, I'm surprised that fluctuations don't cause a bigger change, then again, it might be all due to a random (and extremely unlikely) high-energy particle impact on a nucleus. The article mentions neutrinos, and that sounds like an excellent candidate to me.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

Very interesting! I wonder if there would be any way to use this to determine past solar activity, not to mention the effectiveness of the ozone layer and Earth's magnetic field in keeping radiation from the Earth?

As for errors in carbon dating and such--aren't we discussing very minuscule errors, and wouldn't they average out so that in the long run you can still get a good, useful estimate?
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

if we could ramp up this effect, we could quickly render radioactive materials inert, correct? so we could decontaminate nuclear waste and no longer have to worry about where to store it.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

As for errors in carbon dating and such--aren't we discussing very minuscule errors, and wouldn't they average out so that in the long run you can still get a good, useful estimate?
Click to expand...

Yeah, the difference here is minuscule, which is why it's avoided discovery until now in the first place. It's not going to open up the margin of error for the age of the Earth by any meaningful amount.

UssGlenn said:
if we could ramp up this effect, we could quickly render radioactive materials inert, correct? so we could decontaminate nuclear waste and no longer have to worry about where to store it.
Click to expand...

Given the energy required to mass-produce whatever particle is causing this (again, probably neutrinos) it's much more cost effective and energy efficient to just dig a mile deep shaft, dump the waste in the bottom, and cover it with a mile of concrete.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

STR said:
As for errors in carbon dating and such--aren't we discussing very minuscule errors, and wouldn't they average out so that in the long run you can still get a good, useful estimate?
Click to expand...

Yeah, the difference here is minuscule, which is why it's avoided discovery until now in the first place. It's not going to open up the margin of error for the age of the Earth by any meaningful amount.
Click to expand...

Actually we don't know that yet. We know the observed 20th century variation in the effect is quite small, just as the variation in solar luminosity is quite small, but the early sun was very much fainter than now. We also don't know if this effect stems from standard hydrogen-helium fusion or from reactions involving heavier trace isotopes in the sun that may have been far more prevalent early on.

However, as I mentioned before, since our early dating methods are based on isotopes that are almost stable, such as uranium, I would think they would show little if any effect from it.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

My point was targeted at some of the first commenters, who suggested this would be a weapon of use to creationists. There is no way this is going to open the margin of error from 4.5 billion years to 10,000 years. Maybe 1%, tops, which is within margin of error for radio-dating anyway. In actuality, in relatively stable isotopes (with a half life of more than a year), these fluctuations would have been unintentionally taken into account when calculating the half-life in the first place. At least partially.

I'm thinking this is caused by neutrinos. First, it seems to affect all samples everywhere. Neutrinos can go through the whole planet and out the other side if they don't run into an atom (which is 99.99% probable since solid matter is still 99.99% empty). Second, it's not a dramatic change, which goes along with a particle that doesn't have much of a chance of hitting anything.

I could well be wrong though, I'm no physicist, it just seems to fit.
 
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Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

If the effect is reproducible, I suspect that the effective strength of the weak interaction, which mediates beta decay, is being affected by the change in solar neutrino flux -- approximately 65 billion neutrinos per square centimeter per second at 1 AU. It may well turn out to be an effect that can be explained by current theory or an extension of it. I don't know how difficult it would be to modulate an artificial neutrino source to verify the effect.

I guess being able to change the effective strength of the weak force would be somewhat useful for rendering nuclear weapons and fission reactors more or less powerful.
 
Re: Radioactive decay has 33-day and one-year cycles. Science stunned

STR said:
My point was targeted at some of the first commenters, who suggested this would be a weapon of use to creationists. There is no way this is going to open the margin of error from 4.5 billion years to 10,000 years.
Click to expand...

It doesn't really matter. They'll just forward the OP's article to each other. They'll all read it, understand 25% of it, and conclude that all methods for determining the Earth's approximate age are complete bunk except for Jewish oral history from about 3000 years ago.

I give 2 years, max, before there's a chick tract featuring a line to the effect of "radio-carbon dating was recently proven to be a fatally flawed method."
 
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