Radium bromide the air causes this luminescence. Radium bromide is also very dangerous since the crystals occasionally explode. Helium gas evolved from alpha particles can accumulate within the crystals which cause them to weaken and rupture. Another property of radium bromide is its ability to crystallize from an aqueous solution. It forms a dihydrate, very similar to barium bromide. The chemical radium bromide is not found in nature; it is created. To extract radium from uranium or pitchblende ores, the most common practice is called the Curie method which it involves two major stages. The first stage is a chemical treatment to
Radium sulfate (at 20 °C, only 2.1 mg will dissolve in 1 kg of water) means that it is one of the less biologically dangerous radium compounds. The large ionic radius of Ra (148 pm) results in weak complexation and poor extraction of radium from aqueous solutions when not at high pH. All isotopes of radium have half-lives much shorter than the age of the Earth, so that any primordial radium would have decayed long ago. Radium nevertheless still occurs in the environment, as the isotopes Ra, Ra, Ra, and Ra are part of the decay chains of natural thorium and