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 ...
An example is calcium-40, with 20 neutrons and 20 protons, which is the heaviest stable isotope made of the same number of protons and neutrons. Both calcium-48 and nickel-48 are doubly magic because calcium-48 has 20 protons and 28 neutrons while nickel-48 has 28 protons and 20 neutrons. Calcium-48 is very neutron-rich for such a relatively ...
All other potassium isotopes have half-lives under a day, most under a minute. The least stable is 31 K, a three-proton emitter discovered in 2019; its half-life was measured to be shorter than 10 picoseconds. [5] [6] Stable potassium isotopes have been used for several nutrient cycling studies since potassium is a macronutrient required for ...
On the other hand, carbon-14 decays by beta decay, whereby one neutron is transmuted into a proton with the emission of an electron and an antineutrino. Thus the atomic number increases by 1 (Z: 6 → 7) and the mass number remains the same (A = 14), while the number of neutrons decreases by 1 (N: 8 → 7). [5]
There are 6 stable nuclides and one radioactive primordial nuclide with neutron number 82 (82 is the neutron number with the most stable nuclides, since it is a magic number): barium-138, lanthanum-139, cerium-140, praseodymium-141, neodymium-142, and samarium-144, as well as the radioactive primordial nuclide xenon-136, which decays by a very ...
The 80 elements with one or more stable isotopes comprise a total of 251 nuclides that have not been shown to decay using current equipment. Of these 80 elements, 26 have only one stable isotope and are called monoisotopic. The other 56 have more than one stable isotope. Tin has ten stable isotopes, the largest number of any element.
A filled shell would have "magic numbers" of neutrons and protons. One possible magic number of neutrons for spherical nuclei is 184, and some possible matching proton numbers are 114, 120 and 126. These configurations imply that the most stable spherical isotopes would be flerovium-298, unbinilium-304 and unbihexium-310.
Iron-60 has a half-life of 2.6 million years, [12] [13] but was thought until 2009 to have a half-life of 1.5 million years. It undergoes beta decay to cobalt-60 , which then decays with a half-life of about 5 years to stable nickel-60.