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The most stable radioactive isotopes are technetium-97 with a half-life of 4.21 ± 0.16 million years and technetium-98 with 4.2 ± 0.3 million years; current measurements of their half-lives give overlapping confidence intervals corresponding to one standard deviation and therefore do not allow a definite assignment of technetium's most stable ...
A technetium star, or more properly a Tc-rich star, is a star whose stellar spectrum contains absorption lines of the radioactive metal technetium.The most stable isotope of technetium is 97 Tc with a half-life of 4.21 million years: too short a time to last for the age of the Earth (about 4.5 billion years).
The seven 4f and 6s electrons are valence electrons. [6] In forming compounds, the atom loses its two outermost electrons and one 4f-electron, which belongs to an open subshell. The element's atomic radius is the second largest among all the lanthanides but is only slightly greater than those of the neighboring elements. [ 6 ]
With the longest-lived isotope of technetium, 97 Tc, having a 4.21-million-year half-life, [10] no technetium remains from the formation of the Earth. [ 11 ] [ 12 ] Only minute traces of technetium occur naturally in Earth's crust—as a product of spontaneous fission of 238 U, or from neutron capture in molybdenum —but technetium is present ...
Technetium (43 Tc) is one of the two elements with Z < 83 that have no stable isotopes; the other such element is promethium. [2] It is primarily artificial, with only trace quantities existing in nature produced by spontaneous fission (there are an estimated 2.5 × 10 −13 grams of 99 Tc per gram of pitchblende) [3] or neutron capture by molybdenum.
However there are numerous exceptions; for example the lightest exception is chromium, which would be predicted to have the configuration 1s 2 2s 2 2p 6 3s 2 3p 6 3d 4 4s 2, written as [Ar] 3d 4 4s 2, but whose actual configuration given in the table below is [Ar] 3d 5 4s 1.
The metastable technetium-99m (99m Tc) is a short-lived (half-life about 6 hours) nuclear isomer used in nuclear medicine, produced from molybdenum-99. It decays by isomeric transition to technetium-99, a desirable characteristic, since the very long half-life and type of decay of technetium-99 imposes little further radiation burden on the body.
The detection of technetium in the atmosphere of a red giant star in 1952, [12] by spectroscopy, provided the first evidence of nuclear activity within stars. Because technetium is radioactive, with a half-life much less than the age of the star, its abundance must reflect its recent creation within that star.