An Etymological Dictionary of Astronomy and Astrophysics

The traditional unit of → radioactivity defined as the quantity of any radioactive isotope in which the number of → disintegrations per second is 3.7 × 10¹⁰. Abbreviation: Ci. → becquerel.

See also: Named after the French physicists Pierre Curie (1859-1906) and his wife Marie Curie (1867-1934, née Maria Skłodowska), pioneers of research on radioactivity, who discovered → radium in 1898 and received the Nobel Prize in Physics, 1903, jointly with Henri Becquerel (1852-1908).