Shoe shops used X-ray machines to measure shoe sizes. Way before radiation was fully understood, shoe shops measured sizes through X-rays in the 1940s.
100 Mind-Blowing Radiation Facts
Grapes will explode inside the microwave. For it to explode, you must split the grape almost in half and place it inside. This will create a fireball of plasma which is caused by radiation and heat.
Grapes explode in the microwave. The water found in grapes interacts with the wavelengths of energy from the microwave. After a few seconds, the radiation from the microwave and the plasma in the grape react together which causes the grapes to explode.
Gamma-ray bursts release more energy in 10 seconds than our Sun in its entire life. Nothing in the Universe rivals the power unleashed during a gamma-ray burst, a brief but incredibly intense flash of high-energy radiation. There are many types of gamma-ray bursts: some are thought to form when a massive star implodes; others when two neutron stars merge.
There are stars we will never be able to see. Ever since the Big Bang, most objects in space have been moving away from one another. The expansion of the Universe is accelerating. This is one of the facts about space that has rocked the cosmological boat over the past few years. As regions of space are whizzing away from one another at an ever-increasing rate, the first population of stars to form in the Universe are now too far away for us to ever hope of spying on them – even using the best present or future telescope. Hope is not lost; we can attempt to spot them indirectly via the energetic bursts of radiation they emit at the end of their lives.
The heat from the Big Bang is still around today. The early Universe consisted of a hot soup of ionised gas: a sort of opaque plasma. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, this gas cooled sufficiently enough that atoms were able to form. Radiation left over from the Big Bang is still around us today and is known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It can’t be seen with the naked eye, but various missions over the years have been able to study it in microwave light, including ESA’s Planck satellite and the WMAP mission.