Nucleocosmochronology
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Nucleocosmochronology is a technique used to determine timescales for astrophysical objects and events. This technique employs the abundances of radioactive nuclides in a way that is very similar to the use of C14 in dating archeological samples. Nucleocosmochronology has already been successfully employed to determine the age of the Sun (4.57±0.02 Gyr, where Gyr stands for giga-year, i.e., 109 years) and of the Galactic thin disk (8.3±1.8 Gyr), among others.
This short article was based on Bahcall et al. (1995, Reviews of Modern Physics 67, 781) and on two papers accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysics (del Peloso et al. 2005a,b), available at [1] (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/?0411698) and [2] (http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/?0411699).