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A similar radiogenic series is derived from the long-lived radioactive primordial nuclide 232 Th. These nuclides are described as geogenic, meaning that they are decay or fission products of uranium or other actinides in subsurface rocks. [6] All such nuclides have shorter half-lives than their parent radioactive primordial nuclides.
It is prevented from having a stable isotope with 4 protons and 6 neutrons by the very large mismatch in proton/neutron ratio for such a light element. (Nevertheless, beryllium-10 has a half-life of 1.36 million years, which is too short to be primordial, but still indicates unusual stability for a light isotope with such an imbalance.)
The stable nuclides of lithium, beryllium, and boron found on Earth are thought to have been formed by the same process as the cosmogenic nuclides but at an earlier time in cosmic ray spallation predominantly before the Solar System's formation, and thus they are by definition primordial nuclides and not cosmogenic.
Certain light (low atomic number) primordial nuclides (isotopes of lithium, beryllium and boron) are thought to have been created not only during the Big Bang, but also (and perhaps primarily) to have been made after the Big Bang, but before the condensation of the Solar System, by the process of cosmic ray spallation on interstellar gas and ...
Indeed, none of these primordial isotopes of the elements from beryllium to oxygen have yet been detected, although those of beryllium and boron may be able to be detected in the future. So far, the only stable nuclides known experimentally to have been made during Big Bang nucleosynthesis are protium, deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7.
A set of nuclides with equal proton number (atomic number), i.e., of the same chemical element but different neutron numbers, are called isotopes of the element. Particular nuclides are still often loosely called "isotopes", but the term "nuclide" is the correct one in general (i.e., when Z is not fixed).
The next group is the primordial radioactive nuclides. These have been measured to be radioactive, or decay products have been identified in natural samples (tellurium-128, barium-130). There are 35 of these (see these nuclides ), of which 25 have half-lives longer than 10 13 years.
They include 30 nuclides with measured half-lives longer than the estimated age of the universe (13.8 billion years [17]), and another four nuclides with half-lives long enough (> 100 million years) that they are radioactive primordial nuclides, and may be detected on Earth, having survived from their presence in interstellar dust since before ...