in today's video we're going to look at the nuclear equations for alpha beta and gamma radiation as alpha particles consist of two protons and two neutrons like the nucleus of a helium atom we generally represent them like this as helium 4 2 although you might sometimes see them as the greek letter alpha instead so when an unstable nucleus like uranium-238 undergoes alpha decay and emits one of these alpha particles it's gonna lose two protons and two neutrons to show this we have to subtract 4 from this mass number and 2 from its atomic number so uranium-238 would go to form something with a mass number of 2 3 4 and an atomic number of 90. because the atomic number has changed it will now be a different element so we'd have to check the periodic table to find out that it's now thorium the last thing is to add our helium that was emitted and then just double check that the mass and atomic numbers on each side of the equation are the same overall so if we had a question that asked us to write the equation for the alpha decay of radium226 which has an atomic number of 88 we would start with our radium226 and draw an arrow to our unknown decay product and our alpha particle which we write as a helium nucleus then to figure out what our decay product is we subtract 4 from the 2 to 6 to get a mass number of 2 to 2 and minus 2 from the 88 to get an atomic number of 86 then all we have to do is check the periodic table to figure out what element it is so in this case radon now beta decay is a bit more complicated because it involves a neutron turning into a proton and emitting a fast moving electron which is the beta particle so if carbon 14 was to decay and emit one of these electrons then because it's effectively gained a proton its atomic number would increase from 6 to 7 making it nitrogen rather than carbon however its mass number would stay the same because although it's gained a proton it also lost a neutron so still only has a total of 14 protons and neutrons in its nucleus just like with the alpha particle you can also represent the b subparticle with an actual beta symbol but either way we have to put a minus one at the bottom to show that it has a charge of minus one and a zero at the top to show that its mass is pretty much zero the easiest type of radiation to show is gamma radiation because gamma radiation is pure energy and doesn't have any mass or charge it doesn't change anything so if our thorium-234 from earlier underwent gamma decay it would just go to form thorium-234 again plus a gamma ray which we show with the greek letter gamma the equations for neutron emission are also pretty easy for example beryllium 9 would decay into beryllium eight plus a neutron so all we've done is subtract one from the mass number because it lost one neutron anyway that's everything for today so if you enjoyed it then do tell your friends about us and we'll see you next time