ConceptsCalibration curve
Concept · archaeometry · in 9 mysteries
Calibration curve
The correction that turns a radiocarbon measurement into a calendar date.
Tabby's star (KIC 8462852)The atmosphere's carbon-14 has not been constant, so a raw radiocarbon age is matched against a curve built from tree rings and other dated records to give a calendar range. Where the curve is flat, a tight measurement gives a wide date; where it wiggles, several ranges are possible. Many arguments on this site about a date are arguments about where a sample falls on the curve.
Where it comes up
Voynich Manuscript
Small neural classifiers trained on the T39 simulations give a posterior over every period-cipher setting; checked by simulation-based calibration against rejection ABC before it is used on the herbal sections.
Pictish symbol stones
The authors' decision tree separated their own calibration corpora of known writing and non-linguistic systems.
Younger Dryas impact hypothesis
Recommended calibration of the Baffin Bay dates gives younger ages outside the Younger Dryas, and one core has a non-boundary peak as large as the boundary peak in another.
Phosphine in the clouds of Venus
The feature is an artefact of baseline fitting and calibration, not a property of Venus.ALMA's standard calibration was unsuitable for so bright a target and had to be revised.The team reports the line at about 5 sigma in ALMA data reprocessed with the revised calibration.The team reports the feature in data reduced with revised calibration and in new JCMT data.ALMA project 2018.A.00023.S, Venus in Band 6, 5 March 2019
Methods that use it 1
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Calibration curve [Concept CPT0DECW019N8HS]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW019N8HS
@misc{mysteriesdept_cpt0decw019n8hs,
title = {Calibration curve},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Concept, catalog key CPT0DECW019N8HS},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/CPT0DECW019N8HS}
}