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Francium-223 also has a shorter half-life than the longest-lived isotope of each synthetic element up to and including element 105, dubnium. [8] Francium is an alkali metal whose chemical properties mostly resemble those of caesium. [8] A heavy element with a single valence electron, [9] it has the highest equivalent weight of any element. [8]
Unstable isotopes decay through various radioactive decay pathways, most commonly alpha decay, beta decay, or electron capture. Many rare types of decay, such as spontaneous fission or cluster decay, are known. (See Radioactive decay for details.) [citation needed] Of the first 82 elements in the periodic table, 80 have isotopes considered to ...
Of elements whose most stable isotopes have been identified with certainty, francium is the most unstable. All elements with atomic number of 106 or greater have most-stable-known isotopes shorter than that of francium, but as those elements have only a relatively small number of isotopes discovered, the possibility remains that undiscovered ...
This is a list of radioactive nuclides (sometimes also called isotopes), ordered by half-life from shortest to longest, in seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. Current methods include jumping up and down make it difficult to measure half-lives between approximately 10 −19 and 10 −10 seconds.
The synthetic elements are those with atomic numbers 95–118, as shown in purple on the accompanying periodic table: [1] these 24 elements were first created between 1944 and 2010. The mechanism for the creation of a synthetic element is to force additional protons into the nucleus of an element with an atomic number lower than 95.
Even so, as physicists started to synthesize elements that are not found in nature, they found the stability decreased as the nuclei became heavier. [17] Thus, they speculated that the periodic table might come to an end. The discoverers of plutonium (element 94) considered naming it "ultimium", thinking it was the last. [18]
There are 26 such elements, as listed. Stability is experimentally defined for chemical elements, as there are a number of stable nuclides with atomic numbers over ~ 40 which are theoretically unstable, but apparently have half-lives so long that they have not been observed either directly or indirectly (from measurement of products) to decay.
It is the rarest naturally occurring element in the Earth's crust, occurring only as the decay product of various heavier elements. All of astatine's isotopes are short-lived; the most stable is astatine-210, with a half-life of 8.1 hours.