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Ionium was a name given early in the study of radioactive elements to the 230 Th isotope produced in the decay chain of 238 U before it was realized that ionium and thorium are chemically identical. The symbol Io was used for this supposed element. (The name is still used in ionium–thorium dating.)
Ionium-thorium dating is a technique for determining the age of marine sediments based upon the quantities present of nearly stable thorium-232 and more radioactive thorium-230. (230 Th was once known as ionium, before it was realised it was the same element as 232 Th.) Uranium (in nature, predominantly uranium-238) is soluble in water.
Researchers eventually determined that ionium was actually an isotope of thorium, 230 Th. Soddy asked Hitchins to investigate ionium. She selectively extracted uranium from ore samples to create purified uranium preparations and established a half-life for ionium. Her research also showed that there was a steady rate of increase in the amount ...
Two radiometric dating methods involve thorium isotopes: uranium–thorium dating, based on the decay of 234 U to 230 Th, and ionium–thorium dating, which measures the ratio of 232 Th to 230 Th. [e] These rely on the fact that 232 Th is a primordial radioisotope, but 230 Th only occurs as an intermediate decay product in the decay chain of ...
Once the existence of isotopes was established in 1914, Stefanie Horovitz and Otto Hönigschmid demonstrated that ionium was actually thorium-230, the second known case of an isotope, rather than its own distinct element. However, the work of these two scientists in Vienna, as they precisely measured the atomic weight of lead from radioactive ...
Hence, a parent isotope is one that undergoes decay to form a daughter isotope. For example element 92, uranium, has an isotope with 144 neutrons (236 U) and it decays into an isotope of element 90, thorium, with 142 neutrons (232 Th). The daughter isotope may be stable or it may itself decay to form another daughter isotope.
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Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon, with a half-life of 5,730 years [30] [31] (which is very short compared with the above isotopes), and decays into nitrogen. [32] In other radiometric dating methods, the heavy parent isotopes were produced by nucleosynthesis in supernovas, meaning that any parent isotope with a short half-life ...