How to Use background radiation in a Sentence

background radiation

noun
  • The first is the high volume of background radiation.
    — Tom Hawking, Popular Science, 25 June 2026
  • Around this setup is a water tank that helps protect the experiment from background radiation.
    — Robert Lea, Popular Mechanics, 29 July 2022
  • Many readings in the buffer zone were no higher than natural background radiation values.
    — Vincent Carroll, The Denver Post, 18 Oct. 2019
  • We're constantly exposed to background radiation just by living on Earth.
    — Rhett Allain, WIRED, 23 Feb. 2024
  • The area of the exclusion zone with above-background radiation levels has also shrunk considerably.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 5 Oct. 2018
  • Earth is naturally radioactive, so we are all constantly exposed to a small amount of background radiation.
    — Robert Lea, Space.com, 12 Feb. 2025
  • Researchers found that fluctuations in the background radiation did correspond to clumps of matter.
    — Smithsonian, 9 Oct. 2019
  • This extreme depth shields the detectors from cosmic rays and other background radiation that could obscure potential dark matter signals.
    — Georgina Jedikovska, Interesting Engineering, 18 Mar. 2026
  • 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 experimenters need to establish that the detector is recording dark matter—not just background radiation.
    — Lisa Randall, Discover Magazine, 21 Feb. 2012
  • 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
  • In the decades since, astronomers have learned there’s much more to the unseen universe, finding background radiation at practically every wavelength observed.
    — Steve Nadis, Discover Magazine, 31 May 2018
  • They also can be produced by interactions between high-energy cosmic rays and the universe's background radiation.
    — Doyle Rice, USA TODAY, 13 Feb. 2025
  • These actions not only harmed the soldiers themselves but also caused a significant surge in background radiation levels within the vicinity.
    — Monique Brouillette, Popular Mechanics, 28 Aug. 2023
  • 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
  • Russian state weather monitors reported heightened background radiation levels around the site and beyond.
    — Ankit Panda, The New Republic, 21 Aug. 2019
  • 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 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 photos show light, dark and the polarization of light—background radiation known as the cosmic microwave background, and details the movement of hydrogen and helium gas at the beginning of the universe.
    — Dan Perry, Newsweek, 18 Mar. 2025
  • 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
  • Russia’s emergency ministry says background radiation in nearby Vladivostok was within the natural range.
    — Reuters, Fortune, 23 Sep. 2017
  • 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
  • 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
  • All of the nests discovered at the site emitted less than 1% of the natural background radiation that all humans experience daily, according to the SRS.
    — Julia Jacobo, ABC News, 7 Aug. 2025
  • 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
  • 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
  • These monitoring systems measure natural background radiation and look for unusual increases.
    — Eduardo B. Farfán, The Conversation, 21 Apr. 2026
  • 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
  • Researchers in the collaboration are comparing the latest data on the cosmological microwave background radiation with the various possible shapes of the universe.
    — Manon Bischoff, Scientific American, 23 May 2026
  • 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

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.

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