“...He brought Bertha into the lab one afternoon and exposed her hand to the X-rays. Upon seeing her bones, she freaked out, thinking it a premonition of her death. She refused to go back into his haunted lab after that…”
Have you ever been in the dentist office and a nurse pulls up a picture of teeth and you wonder: “whose teeth are those?” So you ask “Who’s pair of teeth are those?” The nurse says “It’s yours!”, leaving you utterly confused.
In order to ease your confused mind, by the capabilities of technology today, one can actually see their bones and their teeth on a screen through an amazing process. This life-changing process is called X-rays. However, you might be thinking at this very moment, what are X-rays?
Well, X-rays are a higher-energy form of electromagnetic radiations. Electromagnetic radiation is a form of energy that is produced by the constant swinging motion of electric and magnetic disturbance, or the movement of electrically charged particles traveling through a vacuum or matter. X- rays are much more energetic and have a higher penetration power than other forms of radiations except gamma rays. X-rays travel through objects that ordinary light waves can’t, due to the abundance of energy it has.
In relation to the medical field, you will normally see nurses or doctors using them for identifying broken bones or to diagnose specific illnesses. People also used them when conducting security checks through a metal detector to find weapons or other harmful armaments. With all this talk about x-rays and how they function, you may ask, how are x-rays formed and eventually produced?
X-rays are produced in two different ways: a characteristic radiation and Bremsstrahlung radiation.
A characteristic radiation is when an electron with a greater amount of energy will knock off an electron from the tungsten atom. A tungsten atom, element number 74, is a transition metal in period 6, as recorded on the periodic table. An electron from the outer shell of the tungsten atom will fill into the empty space. As the outer electron moves inward, it leaves behind a loss of energy that is emitted as a X-ray photon. Eventually, the X-ray is produced.
The second process of producing X-rays is though Bremsstrahlung radiation. As an electron is put into a straight trajectory to the nucleus, it will slow down and it will be near the nucleus. As the electron is near the nucleus of the atom its path changes and deflects away from the nucleus. As the electron is deflected, it leaves some energy behind emitting as a Bremsstrahlung X-ray photon.
Basically, X-rays are generated when free electrons give up some of their energy as they interact with the orbital electrons or nucleus of an atom.
Now that you know how X-rays are formed, the question is how are X-rays produced? X-rays are generated in an X-ray tube. It consists of a cathode side, a positive electrical charge side, and an anode, a negatively electrical charge side. In the X-ray tube, at high temperature, a stream of high-speed accelerating electrons are attracted and directed from the cathode to the tungsten target anode. This anode rotates to dissipate heat generated. In other words, as there is a beam of electrons beaming at the anode, and the anode rotates at the same time, it creates an X-ray beam directed to the person or object. As the beam go through the person or the object, the beam leave an image on photographic paper.
So, is seeing your bones possible? Yes, it is! Remember there are also many things that X-rays can be used in society besides scanning bones. However, don’t break your bones or bring something harmful to experience X-rays!
