What did Marie Curie do with polonium and radium?
Indefatigable despite a career of physically demanding and ultimately fatal work, she discovered polonium and radium, championed the use of radiation in medicine and fundamentally changed our understanding of radioactivity. Curie was born Marya Skłodowska in 1867 in Warsaw.
What did Marie Curie discover about polonium?
Polonium was discovered by Marie Sklodowska Curie, a Polish chemist, in 1898. She obtained polonium from pitchblende, a material that contains uranium, after noticing that unrefined pitchblende was more radioactive than the uranium that was separated from it.
Who discovered polonium and radium?
Marie and Pierre Curie
Marie and Pierre Curie and the discovery of polonium and radium.
What did Marie Curie use radium for?
She used her newly discovered element, radium, to be the gamma ray source on x-ray machines. This allowed for more accurate and stronger x-rays. She also created smaller and portable x-ray machines that could be used by medics in the field. IN this way she saved many lives and supported the war effort through her work.
When did Marie Curie discover polonium and radium?
1898
And Marie was proven right: in 1898 the Curies discovered two new radioactive elements: radium (named after the Latin word for ray) and polonium (named after Marie’s home country, Poland).
What is polonium used for?
Polonium is an alpha-emitter, hence it is used in antistatic devices and for research purposes. It is used in the form of a thin film on a stainless steel disc as an alpha-particle source. It is used to eliminate static electricity produced during processes such as rolling paper, wire and sheet metal.
What happens if you touch polonium?
So long as polonium is kept out of the human body, it poses little danger because the alpha particles travel no more than a few centimeters and cannot pass through skin. But if polonium is ingested, even in the tiniest quantity, it will so badly damage internal organs that they shut down and death is certain.
How did Marie Curie separate radium?
Marie extracted pure radium salts from pitchblende, a highly radioactive ore obtained from mines in Bohemia. The extraction required tons of the substance, which she dissolved in cauldrons of acid before obtaining barium sulphate and other alkalines, which she then purified and converted into chlorides.
Is polonium more radioactive than radium?
Marie, writing in December 1904, explained why: “Polonium, when it has just been extracted from pitchblende, is as active as radium, but its radioactivity slowly disappears.” We know now that polonium’s most stable isotope has a half-life of 138.39 days compared with the 1,620 years of radium’s longest lived isotope.