How much atomic energy is in the human body

You also contain much smaller amounts of the other elements that are essential for life. While most of the cells in your body regenerate every seven to 15 years, many of the particles that make up those cells have actually existed for millions of millennia. The hydrogen atoms in you were produced in the big bang, and the carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms were made in burning stars.

The very heavy elements in you were made in exploding stars. The size of an atom is governed by the average location of its electrons. If the nucleus were the size of a peanut, the atom would be about the size of a baseball stadium. If we lost all the dead space inside our atoms, we would each be able to fit into a particle of lead dust, and the entire human race would fit into the volume of a sugar cube.

As you might guess, these spaced-out particles make up only a tiny portion of your mass. The mass of the quarks, which comes from their interaction with the Higgs field, accounts for just a few percent of the mass of a proton or neutron.

Gluons, carriers of the strong nuclear force that holds these quarks together, are completely massless. Your body is a small-scale mine of radioactive particles. You receive an annual millirem dose from the natural radioactivity originating inside of you. Your radiation dose level can go up by one or two millirem for every eight hours you spend sleeping next to your similarly radioactive loved one.

In , Stanley Watras , a radiation worker in Pennsylvania, unexpectedly set off an alarm that detected people's exposure to radiation. Safety personnel were puzzled to find that Watras was not physically carrying any sources of radiation, but it was later discovered that his body had absorbed huge amounts of radon gas from his basement — which he was told significantly increased his risk of lung cancer.

Related: Why do nuclear bombs form mushroom clouds? Short said that the radioactive isotopes humans take in are created through different processes. Potassium 40, for instance, is a " primordial nuclide ," meaning it has existed in its current form since before Earth's genesis. Primordial nuclides take so long to break down, or decay, that they are essentially the same today as they were at their creation in stars or in the Big Bang. What about the largest?

Radioactive isotopes, like carbon 14 and a hydrogen isotope known as tritium, are the "daughter" products of heavier elements decaying. When heavier nuclei, like those of uranium atoms, break apart because they are unstable, the constituent parts they break into are often other isotopes. Of note, stable isotopes are held together by the strong force , a fundamental force that binds protons and neutrons together. But as a nucleus gets bigger, the strong force may be overcome by forces that drive protons and neutrons apart — like the electrostatic repulsion between protons.

When nuclei decay into smaller nuclei, they emit high-energy particles or high-energy energy waves, which is where radiation originates. The early universe expanded after the big bang for only 3 seconds before it cooled to a state where subatomic particles assembled into atoms. Hydrogen atoms formed first since they are the simplest type of atom. Hydrogen atoms contain only one proton in its nucleus which makes it number one on the periodic table of elements. After the universe aged a little roughly million years the hydrogen atoms started to clump together under the force of gravity.

As these clumps grew in size, the pressure at the center grew larger. When the temperature reached 15 million degrees F, the pressure caused the hydrogen to fuse their nuclei together. This process is known as nuclear fusion. The positively charged nuclei naturally repel each other. However under high temperatures and pressure, the nuclei are moving fast enough to smash together and fuse.

Some electrons also combine with protons to form neutrons and neutrinos. These neutrons also bind to the nucleus helping it to remain more stable under the nuclear forces. An atom with two protons in its nucleus is Helium. The fusion process also releases a lot of energy in which some of the hydrogen mass converts into light energy.

At this point, our universe has a bunch of large clumps of hydrogen fusing together to create helium while releasing large amounts of light. This is what we commonly call a star! In fact our sun is doing this right now as we speak or read. Take a look at the periodic table to see which number it is. This fusion process continues to create larger and larger nuclei.

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