4. Occasionally an asteroid will break into fragments due to a collision. These

Question

4. Occasionally an asteroid will break into fragments due to a collision. These fragments can leave the asteroid belt and even make their way to Earth. Some asteroid fragments do not completely burn up in the atmosphere and end up on the surface of Earth. It is possible for such a fragment to be radioactive. What is the chief cause of radioactivity? If you had a radiation detector that could measure the amount of radiation—but not the type of radiation—how could you determine which type of radiation was being emitted?

Explanation / Answer

The fast moving asteroids reaches on the Earth’s atmosphere and then it generates lot of heat into due to the frictional forces acts on it. The meteorites undergo abrasion at the time of moving on to the Earth, due to high frictional forces between atmosphere and meteoroids, most of the meteoroids become burn up in the atmosphere due this abrasion and frictional forces. The remaining reached meteoroids parts on the Earth, which is not impacted by the atmosphere. Some of the meteoroids contain radiative elements, because these have formed initially formed by ejecta from the cores of the planets during planetary collisions. The burning of the meteoroids is not due to the radioactive elements within it, it is due to the frictional forces between the atmosphere and meteoroids. If the meteoroids reached on the Earth’s surface, those may exhibit radioactivity. The meteoroids show less radioactive but actually contain strong concentrated radioactive elements than the Earth.

Causes of radioactivity:

The radioactivity of the rocks is due to the unstable nuclei, it is the ability to hold the two nucleuses together. This takes place when the there is an excess amount of the either protons or neutrons within nuclei. In this process, the elements spontaneously undergo nuclear decay with the formation of smaller sized atoms of other elements. In this process radiation emitted in the form of alpha, beta, and gamma decays.

The radiation detector determines amount of the radiation but not what type of radiation is emitted. It would not be possible to detect what type of radiation is being emitted. The radioactive detector helps to know about what types of radiation and energy is released.

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