If sunburn is a radiation burn from UV radiation, and exposure to radiation can make you more radioactive than otherwise (I’m thinking chernobyl here, which I know is infinitely more drastic than the sun as experienced from earth), is there a possibility that part of your skin emits more radiation than usual?
I know that we’re naturally a lil radioactive due to ingesting stuff that is naturally a lil spicy in terms of nuclides etc. But does excessive sun exposure make us temporarily a little more spicy?
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This might belong on r/nostupidquestions or r/showerthoughts because I feel like it is a real stupid question but I’m super interested all the same. And I feel like this community is pretty smart…
In: Biology
That’s not how sunburn works, and it’s also not how radiation works. All electromagnetic energy is radiation. Visible light is radiation, and obviously that doesn’t make stuff radioactive. We need to make the distinction between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation is the kind that we’re talking about when we talk about radioactive stuff (things like x-rays, gamma rays, and certain types of particles). Everything else, like radio waves, visible light, ultraviolet light…etc is all non-ionizing. Non-ionizing radiation has nothing to do with stuff that’s radioactive, and it can’t make you radioactive.
Also, exposure even to ionizing radiation doesn’t make you radioactive. Let’s use x-rays as an example. If you go to the doctor and get an x-ray, the x-rays pass through your body, but that’s all they do. Once they’ve gone through you, they’re gone. You aren’t radioactive and can’t become radioactive. What’s happening when you think of Chernobyl are people who are contaminated with radioactive dust. If you have dust or particles on you that are emitting radiation, you’re getting exposed, and so are people near you, but you yourself are not radioactive. You can wash that radioactive stuff on you and the radiation goes away.
You don’t become radioactive from either UV nor ionizing radiation (unless you’re inside a nuclear reactor under very specific and also very long circumstances).
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