Radiocarbon and other radionuclides in meteorites and lunar samples
A. J. Timothy Jull
NSF Arizona AMS Laboratory


Material in space, whether in a meteoroid, asteroid or planetary object, is irradiated by solar and galactic cosmic radiation. Meteorites and lunar samples preserve a history of this irradiation. Depending on the half-life of the nuclide, the activity can be used to estimate the exposure age of meteorites in space or also their terrestrial residence age from the decay of radionuclides from the original activity. The terrestrial age can potentially give us information about infall rates of material in the past. On the surface of the Moon, solar cosmic rays produce radionuclides in the top few centimeters of rocks and this signal can be used to infer past solar activity, from the production rates of different nuclides.