how does an x-ray work?
In: 1
So, to step back for a minute:
When we are talking about x-rays, we are talking about the electromagnetic radiation spectrum in a specific band of frequencies – this is responsible for radio waves, light, and the ionizing radiation that we think of when we think of radioactive things. It’s all the same thing (photons moving) but as you get more energetic, the photons oscillate more rapidly.
The more energetic the EM radiation is, the smaller a space it can fit through. As a tangent, this is why you’ll notice a mesh of sorts on most microwave doors – those are sized so that the actual microwave radiation waves are too big to fit through the holes, but light goes through just fine.
X-rays have the property of being small enough to fit through the gaps in the molecular structure of flesh, but not quite small enough to go through the more dense bone structure.
So in that way, X-Ray imaging works a lot like a camera, except instead of catching an image of what the light bouncing off of you looked like, you’re capturing what the X-Rays bouncing off of you looked like.
Latest Answers