| any method of determining the age of earth materials or objects of organic origin based on measurement of either short-lived radioactive elements or the amount of a long-lived radioactive element plus its decay product. |
A process for determining the age of an object by measuring the amount of a given radioactive material it contains. If one knows how much of this radioactive material was present initially in the object (by determining how much of the material has decayed), and one knows the half-life of the material, one can deduce the age of the object.
Note: The best known example of radioactive dating employs carbon 14, a radioactive isotope of carbon.
