Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 make it difficult to measure half-lives between approximately 10 −19 and 10 −10 seconds. [1]
At least 3,300 nuclides have been experimentally characterized [1] (see List of radioactive nuclides by half-life for the nuclides with decay half-lives less than one hour). A nuclide is defined conventionally as an experimentally examined bound collection of protons and neutrons that either is stable or has an observed decay mode .
Six isotopes of livermorium are known, with mass numbers of 288–293 inclusive; the longest-lived among them is livermorium-293 with a half-life of about 80 milliseconds. A seventh possible isotope with mass number 294 has been reported but not yet confirmed. In the periodic table, it is a p-block transactinide element.
Beryllium-8 has an extremely short half-life (8.19 × 10 −17 seconds), and decays back into two helium-4 nuclei. This, along with the unbound nature of 5 He and 5 Li, creates a bottleneck in Big Bang nucleosynthesis and stellar nucleosynthesis, [8] for it necessitates a very fast reaction rate. [13]
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]
The most stable of these nuclear isomers is astatine-202m1, [i] which has a half-life of about 3 minutes, longer than those of all the ground states bar those of isotopes 203–211 and 220. The least stable is astatine-213m1; its half-life of 110 nanoseconds is shorter than 125 nanoseconds for astatine-213, the shortest-lived ground state. [5]
Rutherford applied the principle of a radioactive element's half-life in studies of age determination of rocks by measuring the decay period of radium to lead-206. Half-life is constant over the lifetime of an exponentially decaying quantity, and it is a characteristic unit for the exponential decay equation. The accompanying table shows the ...
Only four of these 35 nuclides have half-lives shorter than, or equal to, the age of the universe. Most of the remaining 30 have half-lives much longer. The shortest-lived primordial isotope, 235 U, has a half-life of 703.8 million years, about one sixth of the age of the Earth and the Solar System.