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Makarov_711
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- TL;DR Summary
- I ran 2 tests of 12 hours, one of the tests involved a piece of beryllium being placed on top of radium pocket watch hands, there was an increase in radiation over a 12 hour period compared to the test without the beryllium. Why was there and an increase and was I detecting protons?
Hello, I'm new here and recently did a little experiment in my free time that left me puzzled. To sum it up I ran 2 tests, each running over 12 hours long, they where focused on 3 radium pocket watch hands that I bought off of eBay a while ago and a small piece of beryllium. These hands are pretty miniscule, they are for a pocket watch and combined they only have the activity of about 1 to 2 microcuries. During the first test I placed the hands in an assembly made of paraffin blocks, only a few centimeters in length and about ~2 centimeters in width. 2 Blocks of paraffin rested atop the watch hands although they where held up by some coins to prevent the wax touching the hands, they had a total thickness of 3.8 CM, I placed my Geiger counter on top of this and left it running for 12 hours. When I came back its total count was 14,781 counts in 12 hours. I redid what I stated above but before placing the wax on top I placed a piece of beryllium right on top of the watch hands, once again this was then covered by 3.8 CM of paraffin before letting the counter run for another 12 hours. After the 12 hours the counter displayed an increase of 294 counts, 15,075 in 12 hours compared to 14,781. Does anyone know what this kind of radiation is and why it happened? I do know that beryllium spits out neutrons when bombarded with alpha particles but they are neutral and wouldn't be detected by my counter, I read some sources that say that paraffin wax releases protons when struck by neutrons, could it be proton radiation?