Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The darker more stable isotope region departs from the line of protons (Z) = neutrons (N), as the element number Z becomes larger. This is a list of chemical elements by the stability of their isotopes. Of the first 82 elements in the periodic table, 80 have isotopes considered to be stable. [1] Overall, there are 251 known stable isotopes in ...
Of the known chemical elements, 80 elements have at least one stable nuclide. These comprise the first 82 elements from hydrogen to lead, with the two exceptions, technetium (element 43) and promethium (element 61), that do not have any stable nuclides. As of 2024, there are total of 251 known "stable" nuclides.
The half-lives of nuclei also decrease when there is a lopsided neutron–proton ratio, such that the resulting nuclei have too few or too many neutrons to be stable. [14] The stability of a nucleus is determined by its binding energy, higher binding energy conferring greater stability.
Of the 80 elements with at least one stable isotope, 26 have only one stable isotope. The mean number of stable isotopes for the 80 stable elements is 3.1 stable isotopes per element. The largest number of stable isotopes for a single element is 10 (for tin, element 50).
There are 251 known so-called stable nuclides. Many of these in theory could decay through spontaneous fission, alpha decay, double beta decay, etc. with a very long half-life, but no radioactive decay has yet been observed. Thus, the number of stable nuclides is subject to change if some of these 251 are determined to be very long-lived ...
Of the 94 natural elements, eighty have a stable isotope and one more has an almost-stable isotope (with a half-life of 2.01×10 19 years, over a billion times the age of the universe). [ 15 ] [ b ] Two more, thorium and uranium , have isotopes undergoing radioactive decay with a half-life comparable to the age of the Earth .
Thus, about two-thirds of stable elements occur naturally on Earth in multiple stable isotopes, with the largest number of stable isotopes for an element being ten, for tin (50 Sn). There are about 94 elements found naturally on Earth (up to plutonium inclusive), though some are detected only in very tiny amounts, such as plutonium-244.
The island of stability is a hypothetical region in the top right cluster of nuclides that contains isotopes far more stable than other transuranic elements. There are no stable nuclides having an equal number of protons and neutrons in their nuclei with atomic number greater than 20 (i.e. calcium) as can be readily observed from the chart ...