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Tin (50 Sn) is the element with the greatest number of stable isotopes (ten; three of them are potentially radioactive but have not been observed to decay). This is probably related to the fact that 50 is a "magic number" of protons.
Of the 26 "monoisotopic" elements that have only a single stable isotope, all but one have an odd atomic number—the single exception being beryllium. In addition, no odd-numbered element has more than two stable isotopes, while every even-numbered element with stable isotopes, except for helium, beryllium, and carbon, has at least three.
Hydrogen (1 H) has three naturally occurring isotopes: 1 H, 2 H, and 3 H. 1 H and 2 H are stable, while 3 H has a half-life of 12.32(2) years. [3] [nb 1] Heavier isotopes also exist; all are synthetic and have a half-life of less than 1 zeptosecond (10 −21 s). [4] [5] Of these, 5 H is the least stable, while 7 H is the most.
As discussed above, only 80 elements have any stable isotopes, and 26 of these have only one stable isotope. 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).
The other six isotopes forming 82.7% of natural tin have capture cross sections of 0.3 barns or less, making them effectively transparent to neutrons. [27] Tin has 31 unstable isotopes, ranging in mass number from 99 to 139. The unstable tin isotopes have half-lives of less than a year except for tin-126, which has a half-life of
A chemical element, often simply called an element, is a type of atom which has a specific number of protons in its atomic nucleus (i.e., a specific atomic number, or Z). [ 1 ] The definitive visualisation of all 118 elements is the periodic table of the elements , whose history along the principles of the periodic law was one of the founding ...
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.
Certain elements have no stable isotopes and are composed only of radioisotopes: specifically the elements without any stable isotopes are technetium (atomic number 43), promethium (atomic number 61), and all observed elements with atomic number greater than 82. Of the 80 elements with at least one stable isotope, 26 have only one stable isotope.