Eli5, how shadows after a nuclear bomb happens?

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I do not know whether its biology or chemistry 😭

In: Chemistry

5 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Pretty simple. The object in front is hit by all the radiation and whatever behind it is shielded. The radiation is enough to damage whatever is in front while the object in the back is left undamaged (assuming it survives the subsequent pressure wave).

Anonymous 0 Comments

Think about how burning wood creates ash. With a super intense wave of energy, your body will basically become ash and be blown to the nearest structure.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s physics. What’s messed up is the shadows aren’t shadows. They are where people were between the blast and the ground. They aren’t ground made darker, everything else was bleached

Anonymous 0 Comments

Like an X-ray of your bones, the plate starts out as white, and where the rays are blocked by denser material (i.e bone) it stays white when the rest of the plate goes black.

It isn’t a shadow per se, but the surrounding areas has been bleached by the radiation.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Leave a poster or a book cover in a sun-facing window for a year. I’ll wait.

Okay, you should be back by now. You might have noticed that it’s more faded now than a year ago. That’s because the sun’s radiation caused the pigments to break down. A nuclear bomb also produces a lot of radiation, all at once. Whatever was close to the explosion received more radiation flux in that brief moment than whatever you put in your window did over the entire year.

A human body is enough to block sufficient radiation that spots where people were between the blast and the object were less bleached than the areas that were hit directly. A lot of radiation still passed through the people (doing horrible damage to their cells while doing so) and into what was behind them, but the difference was enough that it would be easily visible.