I’ve been searching and can’t quite find the explanation I’m looking for. I’ve read that radioactivity comes from an atom containing too many neutrons, and so the neutrons will end up breaking off of the atom and go flying in some direction until it collides with something. Which leads me to my first part:
* What happens when this neutron collides with something?
* If we’re talking a person, I’m assuming it damages/destroys the cell it hits, does it bounce and keep destroying more? What if a person was exposed to insanely high radiation of this sort. Do they melt into a pile of goop as their cells are broken down?
I’ve read that the number after an element is supposed to represent the amount of neutrons. So Uranium-238 would have more neutrons than Uranium-235. But isn’t the protons/neutron/electron the entire makeup of the atom?
* How can the amount of neutrons differ and they still be considered the same element?
From what I understand, radioactive decay is what happens to a radioactive element naturally as it’s neutrons fire off.
* What happens to the element? Does it just eventually disappear or “evaporate”? What exactly happens to these atoms once the neutrons have all fired off?
* If the radioactive substance is a metal such as iridium, does it become super brittle once fully decayed? Crumble into dust?
I have absolutely no education or experience in this field, but it fascinates the hell out of me.
In: Chemistry
There’s a few different ways radiation can affect your cells.
DNA is important. It’s a big molecule made of atoms bonded together. When a fast neutron or other particle comes by and happens to collide with it, it’s like taking that nice orderly structure and hitting it with a cannonball. So now you have broken DNA, and that doesn’t work right. Usually that means the cell can’t do something it needs to do and the cell will die. Get enough of your cells affected, and the mass cell death across your entire body is very bad for you. This is radiation poisoning. Your body has cells die all the time, and it has cleanup and regeneration protocols to handle it. But this kind of mass death is too much for your body to deal with, so everything just stops working right. Bleeding out of your capillaries, organs no longer doing their job, that sort of thing.
Sometimes the cell doesn’t die, but it’s still not working right and so becomes cancerous.
If the radiation is really intense, simply absorbing a ton of energy from it hitting you is enough to heat up your tissue enough to cause burns.
As far as the decay process itself, it has to do with how the nucleus of an atom is held together. The identity of an atom is determined by its protons, change the number of protons and you have a new element. Change the amount of neutrons and you have the same element, chemically, but the weight is different so we call it an “isotope.” The protons want to fly apart due to their charge, but the whole thing is held together with the nuclear strong force. This force is, well, strong, but it’s not infinite. Neutrons help balance the two forces, but the ratios are important to stability. Too few neutrons or too many can both lead to instability, or even just not quite the right number. Add or subtract even one neutron and you can dramatically change the nucleus’s stability.
There’s different ways atoms can spontaneously decay. Sometimes a nucleus will eject a neutron, changing its isotope but not its atomic number so it’s the same element. “Alpha decay” is emitting two protons and two neutrons, aka a helium nucleus. So the original element changes, and is now a new element. Beta decay is when a neutron splits itself into a proton and an electron – the proton stays put in the nucleus, raising atomic number by one, and the electron flies off as radiation. Sometimes the whole nucleus will crack into two big pieces, making two new atoms that add up to the atomic number of the first.
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