![]() What's more, ignoring the real problem of ionizing radiation, some used leftover paint chips to highlight their nails and lips. Unfortunately, far from remaining a mere luminous anecdote, this invention led to the death of more than a hundred women, the so-called "radio girls", workers who applied layers of this paint in watch factories, and who died after suffering kidney, bone or facial cancer problems since they ingested a large amount of radium by moistening the brush with which they worked with their own tongue. However, what glows is not the radioactivity of the radium as such, but a reaction (radioluminescence) that occurs when the radium is mixed with copper and zinc sulfide contained in the paint itself. Furthermore, if manganese was added, the luminescence was orange, thus creating a whole wide palette of “radioactive” hues. So someone had the idea of decorating clocks and walls with this strange mixture (patented by the US Radium Corporation as Undark paint) to bring out the vividness of the colors. This brightness penetrated society so deeply that even today more than one large paint company calls the brightest green in its color palette “radioactive green”. The popularity of the “green glow of radioactivity” spread like wildfire when it was discovered that if you added a little bit of radium to certain types of paints, they would take on an extraordinary greenish luminosity, even in the dark. In general, this photon is outside the visible range, but by choosing a suitable material, such as phosphor or zinc, photons visible to the human eye can be produced, thus releasing the material a certain color glow. Said electron returns to its original state of lower energy by emitting a photon with the “excess” energy, which depends on the material. On a physical level, the incident radiation particle interacts with an atom of the white material, exciting an orbital electron. This effect of producing light in a material by bombarding it with ionizing radiation is known as radioluminescence and can be used as a low-level light source to illuminate certain objects, clocks or road signs without the need for external power sources. Therefore, the issue of the glow of radioactive substances has been present in popular belief since the very discovery of radioactivity itself. In this post we are going to try to shed some light (pun intended) on both effects to help understand why certain glows are produced in the presence of which radioactive substance.Īt the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, the Curies discovered an unusual fact (and which, according to them, violated Carnot's principle): the radiation emitted by polonium and radium compounds made platinum-cyanide slightly luminescent. So where does the idea come from that radioactive substances are glowing, or that if you ingest something radioactive you're going to glow in the dark, like Radioactive Man? There are two physical effects responsible for this belief being so widespread: radioluminescence and Cerenkov radiation. Now, the myth of the glow of radioactive substances, like almost all popular beliefs, has a historical basis. It is precisely because it is so energetic that it becomes dangerous for humans and, contrary to popular belief, it is further away from human visibility the more energetic it is. ![]() Ionizing radiation, on the contrary, is located in the high energy part, beyond the ultraviolet and, therefore, not visible. The visible section (by the human eye) of the spectrum is only a small part of it, and it is concentrated in the low energy zone. To understand it, all you have to do is turn to the electromagnetic spectrum. The reality is very different: by the mere fact of being radioactive, the energy of the emitted radiation is so high that it becomes invisible to the human eye. Burns style after dozens of years working at his power station. If that were the case, and since the rocks or ourselves contain traces of radioactive material, the earth, animals, and plants would glow in the dark, at purest Mr. Radioactivity is, in the vast majority of cases, imperceptible, so we can affirm without too much fear of being wrong that if a substance, object or material is radioactive, it does not shine, even in the dark.
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