The Carnival of Space is on at Discovery Space Blog and it’s in alphabetical order, just for something different. No contribution from moi this week as I’m mulling over different bits of space news and trying to write an essay about a new theory of Lunar origins, but was sidetracked by the recent discovery of variable radioactive decay. The Jenkins-Fishbach Effect is a variation in radioactive decay that seems to be correlated with the Sun’s activity – no one has a good theory for what might cause it (if it’s a real correlation) so there’s several competing models, one being variable neutrino flux from the Sun. It’s interesting and potentially explains the very difficult C-14 dating anomalies (for example the fact that C-14 dates between 800 and 400 BC all give the same answer.)
If the variation is neutrino driven then objects on eccentric orbits will show different decay histories and potentially more (or less) heating. Mercury, for example, has an eccentricity of over 0.2 and thus its orbital variation in insolation is very high. Has its radioactives decayed differently to Earth’s and the Moon’s?
