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spaghetti-machete: zooophagous: woobiemeister: zooophagous: zooophagous: woobiemeister: @zooophagous Apologies for the hassle, I hope you don’t mind the tag. This is the radium item I mentioned. The paint is flaking off and (I suspect) getting toxic waste in the air. I’m debating whether I should be contacting the city for disposal. Is this piece confirmed radium? Just looking at the image, the color doesn’t seem correct for radium paint. Radium paint breaks down over time and tends to turn rust brown, so it’s fairly uncommon to find pieces today that retain their original white or pale green, and when you hit radium with a UV light it should show up bright green and not bright blue.There are other heavy metals that do glow blue however, like manganese and lead (and we all know lead paint was historically extremely common) so I’d double check with a Geiger counter to make sure, if you’re able to find one.That being said, whether its radium or lead if its flaking off its a health hazard so it needs to be kept under glass and in a way that nobody can accidentally carry flakes on their hands or ingest it. Forgot to add these- pictures for reference from Wikipedia Okay so I did some reading and asked around in a few other places (and by other places, I mean a forum for nuclear workers and crossposting in several subreddits.) I think I’ve got a better guess now. It’s most likely zinc sulphide that’s been activated by silver. Radium would make it a radioluminescent paint, which relies on ionizing radiation to emit light. But if it’s zinc sulphide then it would be a phosphorescent paint. Zinc sulphide is a semiconductor, meaning it has an energy gap in its electron bands. Combining zinc sulphide with copper, silver or manganese turns that energy gap into a conduction band. This makes it possible for it to absorb light and glow. I cannot elaborate any further because I only understand the watered down version of this. The important thing is that it’s not emitting a significant amount of radiation. Activating zinc sulphide with copper produces a green glow. Activating it with silver makes it blue. I think the intensity of the glow is exaggerated on this image but the hues seem accurate. https://materialdistrict.com/material/glow-in-the-dark/ For context, this crucifix was made around 1910. I think I mentioned the age over PM but failed to add that the glow on it is stronger after exposure to light and that it dissipates over time. I did not think this was an important detail but someone at the nuclear worker’s forum pointed out this is evidence that it’s not radium. Some family members used to work on the nuclear bomb testing that was going on around New Mexico during WWII. Those areas have experienced an uptick in cancer cases because of this. It is why I got concerned when grandma brought over a glowing Jesus from Los Alamos. My paranoid mind presumed it was some kind of lesser-known radium product. It is from around the same time radium dials started to become a publically available thing. People just didn’t know. That’s so cool! Mystery solved then. I’m glad you were able to hunt down more concrete answers. @apocrypals mystery nightlight jesus Blue Messiah in the outlet by the light switch -- source link
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