![]() Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul and /PaulMattSutter.Antoine-Henri Becquerel was a French physicist (Paris, 1852 - Le Croisic, 1908). Learn more by listening to the "Ask a Spaceman" podcast, available on iTunes and. Steve Weatherall gives a great Ted-ED presentation about radioactivity in this video. The book “Marie Curie and Radioactivity” is a great illustrated resource for younger readers to introduce them to the concept of radioactivity and the pioneering work of Marie Curie.įor older readers, try out "Radioactivity: A History of a Mysterious Science" by Marjorie C. This means the half-life tells you how long it will take for half the mass of radioactive material to decay, according to HyperPhysics. Every second that goes by, you are never sure which atom will decay, but you can feel pretty confident that some atom, somewhere in the lump, will do so. That's the idea behind a half-life.įor example, a single lump of uranium contains almost countless atoms. ![]() Every once in a while, a slightly unstable atomic nucleus will spontaneously decay into something else.Įven though we can never know when a single atom will decay, we can build statistics of how a whole population of atoms will decay. Quantum mechanics allows for this to happen, but it does so randomly. In classical physics, radioactive decay could never happen, because it is not possible spend energy that does not exist. (Image credit: Getty Images) Is radioactive decay a chemical process? Protons and neutrons in an atom are usually held together by a strong force. The atom will be in a lower-energy state, but it has to spend a little to get there. The only way to get there is by removing parts of itself or changing one of its components, which costs a bit of energy. The atom might prefer to have a different combination of protons and neutrons, but it has to get there somehow. ![]() There's still a strong force "bag" holding all the sloshing protons and neutrons inside it. This is because even highly unstable nuclei are bound together. If you were to take a single atom, you would never be able to predict exactly when that atom will decay. Gamma radiation is the release of a high-energy photon, according to the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The different ways a nucleus can rearrange itself lead to the different kinds of radiation.Īlpha radiation is actually an entire helium nucleus (two protons and two neutrons) splintered off larger elements.īeta radiation is an electron ejected when a proton turns into a neutron. If an atomic nucleus isn't in its lowest-energy state possible, radioactive decay can happen when the nucleus reshuffles and reorganizes itself to find a new stable situation. Or, if there are too many neutrons, the strong force isn't always capable of keeping everything together and preventing neutrons from wandering away. If there are too many protons, for example, the electrostatic repulsion of those protons destabilizes the nucleus. But sometimes, things can become unbalanced. ![]() Most atomic nuclei are stable most of the time the balance of forces inside them keep them together. ![]()
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