How did she do it? Like what steps and why? Why does it work as it does?
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Follow-up question, how could they measure the radioactivity?
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Radium exists in Uranium ores because Uranium over time decays and one of the intermediate steps in that chain is Radium. So Marie Curie just took a bunch of Uranium ore and separated out everything in it, (I don’t know the exact chemical reactions, but it’ll be like purifying any other sample, basically find some property that one element has that the other doesn’t, and use that to separate them out) then did a bunch of tests, and made sure that the thing they had purified had actually been a new element.
They could tell that there was probably something unknown in the sample, because the ore was more radioactive than pure Uranium would be.
The first thing was that she had a sample of uranium ore, which they understood to be radioactive. But this specific sample was much much much more radioactive than they expected from the uranium alone. Prompting her and her husband to try and figure what was going on.
They were able to isolate radium-salts by dissolving a lot of a radioactive mineral called pitchblende in acid, and were slowly able to gather from hundreds of pounds of ore less than a gram of Radium Chloride. Proving the existence of this new element and later continued to work of making pure metallic radium.
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