I just read that the fastest meteorites can travel up to 160,000mph which is a significant difference to the 67,000mph the Earth travels around the sun at.

 

I was just wondering if the meteorite hunters take time dilation into account when dating a meteor rock.

If a chunk got blown off Mars 2 billion years ago because of time dilation when they carbon dated it they found it to be 1.999 billion years old. The process that affects the carbon allowing it to be dated would be slowed down by the time dilation, wouldn't it??

They didn't carbon-date the rock.

 

The rock from Mars wuldn't have travelled that fast for very long, and the time dilation would only happen during the travel. And 160,000 mph is only about .00024c, so the effect is minimal.

Still, an interesting question I've not seen being asked before.

"They didn't carbon-date the rock."

 

Didn't they observe how much it was altered by cosmic rays during its journey?

 

Btw, was it rubidium-87 that they observe to date reeeally old stuff like meteorites that come from space, as carbon-dating isn't too reliable after several million years?

It's a 50,000yr limit on the reliability of C-14 testing.

It's a 50,000yr limit on the reliability of C-14 testing.

 

Not only that, it requires Nitrogen bombarded by neutron to form it (typically in the atmosphere), and intake by organisms that intake the atmospheric Carbon.

 

A rock from Mars would be lacking in the Nitrogen atmosphere or the Carbon intake. Even on Earth, Carbon dating is limited to a subset of organic samples.