What is radioactivity?
Answers
The phenomenon of spontaneous emission of active radiations by certain elements is called radioactivity.
The substance which emit such radiations are called radioactive substances.
Radioactivity, property exhibited by certain types of matter of emitting energy and subatomic particles spontaneously. It is, in essence, an attribute of individual atomic nuclei....
An unstable nucleus will decompose spontaneously, or decay, into a more stable configuration but will do so only in a few specific ways by emitting certain particles or certain forms of electromagnetic energy. Radioactive decay is a property of several naturally occurring elements as well as of artificially produced isotopes of the elements. The rate at which a radioactive element decays is expressed in terms of its half-life; i.e., the time required for one-half of any given quantity of the isotope to decay. Half-lives range from more than 1,000,000,000 years for some nuclei to less than 10−9 second (see below Rates of radioactive transitions). The product of a radioactive decay process—called the daughter of the parent isotope—may itself be unstable, in which case it, too, will decay. The process continues until a stable nuclide has been formed.