How to Use background radiation in a Sentence

background radiation

noun
Definition of background radiationnext
  • The Planck satellite is designed to look at the background radiation of the Universe in unprecedented detail.
    — Phil Plait, Discover Magazine, 12 Jan. 2011
  • The clay here has three times the background radiation in the environment, and is the byproduct of not just consumer electronics, but of the components of green technologies such as wind turbines and electric cars.
    — Carl Engelking, Discover Magazine, 10 Apr. 2015
  • The background radiation in most of the 18-mile Exclusion Zone around the nuclear plant, after 36 years, poses scant risks and is about equivalent to a high-altitude airplane flight.
    — New York Times, 8 Apr. 2022
  • Around this setup is a water tank that helps protect the experiment from background radiation.
    — Robert Lea, Popular Mechanics, 29 July 2022
  • The federal helicopter survey was originally supposed to fly above parts of the Bay Area as part of a research project to study background radiation levels.
    — Cynthia Dizikes, SFChronicle.com, 3 Sep. 2020
  • The area of the exclusion zone with above-background radiation levels has also shrunk considerably.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 5 Oct. 2018
  • The most obvious explanation for such a strong signal is that the neutral gas was colder than predicted, which would have allowed it to absorb even more background radiation.
    — Liz Kruesi, WIRED, 31 Mar. 2018
  • The latency period for lung cancer from radiation is longer than five years and 74 mSv spread over four years is not enough dose to cause any health effects, being lower than background radiation in many many places on Earth.
    — James Conca, Forbes, 12 Nov. 2021
  • Many readings in the buffer zone were no higher than natural background radiation values.
    — Vincent Carroll, The Denver Post, 18 Oct. 2019
  • Researchers found that fluctuations in the background radiation did correspond to clumps of matter.
    — Smithsonian, 9 Oct. 2019
  • Then the sky would have reddened, before slowly dimming into pitch darkness; there was simply nothing else there to produce visible light, as the wavelengths of the background radiation continued to stretch through the infrared spectrum and beyond.
    — Davide Castelvecchi, Scientific American, 26 Aug. 2019
  • But all detectors, no matter how well-shielded, experience noise from sources such as background radiation.
    — Daniel Garisto, Scientific American, 9 June 2020
  • Professor Mukherjee says that photons from high-energy sources tend to get absorbed by infrared background radiation.
    — Eoin O'Carroll, The Christian Science Monitor, 12 July 2018
  • The universe primarily consisted of neutral hydrogen gas floating in an omnipresent sea of background radiation leftover from the Big Bang.
    — Jake Parks, Discover Magazine, 3 Mar. 2018
  • The National Academy of Sciences on Monday published all three studies — on background radiation, food, and crater sediments.
    — Susanne Rust, Los Angeles Times, 15 July 2019
  • The needle jumps, showing a reading 50% higher than the already elevated background radiation.
    — Gavin Blair, The Christian Science Monitor, 26 Feb. 2021
  • Standard quantum theory can explain nearly all of these variations, but in 2015, new data released by the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft revealed evidence of small anomalies in the background radiation.
    — Tim Folger, Discover Magazine, 11 Apr. 2017
  • Regulatory limits on annual exposure around nuclear plants are less than a year’s background radiation from rocks and cosmic rays.
    — Robert Hargraves, WSJ, 26 Jan. 2022
  • The exposures from the plutonium releases last year were minuscule by comparison, estimated to be a small fraction of the background radiation that every human gets from nature.
    — Ted Sickinger, OregonLive.com, 22 Apr. 2018
  • Russian state weather monitors reported heightened background radiation levels around the site and beyond.
    — Ankit Panda, The New Republic, 21 Aug. 2019
  • Many factors contribute to errors in quantum systems, including the environment, noise from internal components, background radiation, cabling, and even noise caused by qubits themselves.
    — Paul Smith-Goodson, Forbes, 15 June 2021
  • Russia’s emergency ministry says background radiation in nearby Vladivostok was within the natural range.
    — Reuters, Fortune, 23 Sep. 2017
  • Early in the 20th century, many scientists believed background radiation levels on Earth diminished at higher altitudes.
    — Mark Johnson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 12 July 2018
  • All qubits are fragile and susceptible to errors caused by interactions with environmental factors such as electrical noise from internal components, background radiation, other qubits, wiring, and much more.
    — Paul Smith-Goodson, Forbes, 2 June 2022
  • The reactors themselves are being decommissioned, but air dose rates in residential areas have fallen 71 percent to .37 microserviets per hour, within the range of naturally occurring background radiation.
    — Laura Mallonee, Wired, 3 Feb. 2020
  • Further such tests, and more refined observations of other cosmological features (such as the remnant microwave background radiation generated when the universe was young), might still someday find flaws in general relativity.
    — Tom Siegfried, Scientific American, 21 Jan. 2020

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'background radiation.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: