I get radiation is basically light…..some we some we don’t. And the more intense it is the worse it is. So if a thing has become radioactive, is it basically glowing? And how is that happening? What is the energy source?
In: Planetary Science
Radiation from radioactive materials is actually invisible. Even a very strongly radioactive material will just look like a piece of metal or mineral. You might be able to sense that something is strongly radioactive if it feels warm to the touch, or you develop skin burns just by standing near it – but in either case, this is a *very* bad situation for you and you should not be wherever you are right now. Mildly radioactive materials would be impossible to distinguish from non-radioactive materials.
There are two phenomenon that you might be thinking of here, though. One of them is due to the ionization of air. High energy can cause air molecules to ionize, basically losing their electrons and becoming plasma, for a brief time, and this causes them to emit light. This is the reason why lightning emits light – the electricity ionizes the air as it travels. Ionizing radiation can – as the name might imply – ionize materials like air, and under certain conditions this can be enough to make the air glow blue. Again, though, if you’re in a place seeing this happen, you should probably leave immediately; some of the few times it’s ever been seen is in the Chernobyl disaster, directly above the uncovered core immediately after the explosion, and during accidents like the ‘demon core’ incident that killed Louis Slotin.
The other phenomenon is Cherenkov radiation, which is again visible as blue light, but is produced by a different mechanism. It’s kind of complicated so I won’t go into it, but suffice to say that fast-moving particles in a medium (like water) can cause it. This one gets associated with radioactive materials because it is often visible in nuclear reactors.
Latest Answers