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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]
Bismuth-209 was long thought to have the heaviest stable nucleus of any element, but in 2003, a research team at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France, discovered that 209 Bi undergoes alpha decay with a half-life of 20.1 exayears (2.01×10 19, or 20.1 quintillion years), [3] [4] over 10 9 times longer than the estimated age of the universe. [5]
This is the longest half-life directly measured for any unstable isotope; [4] only the half-life of tellurium-128 is longer. [ citation needed ] Of the chemical elements, only 1 element ( tin ) has 10 such stable isotopes, 5 have 7 stable isotopes, 7 have 6 stable isotopes, 11 have 5 stable isotopes, 9 have 4 stable isotopes, 5 have 3 stable ...
Astatine-219, with a half-life of 56 seconds, is the longest lived of the naturally occurring isotopes. [ 6 ] Isotopes of astatine are sometimes not listed as naturally occurring because of misconceptions [ 103 ] that there are no such isotopes, [ 114 ] or discrepancies in the literature.
Considering all decay modes, various models indicate a shift of the center of the island (i.e., the longest-living nuclide) from 298 Fl to a lower atomic number, and competition between alpha decay and spontaneous fission in these nuclides; [83] these include 100-year half-lives for 291 Cn and 293 Cn, [55] [78] a 1000-year half-life for 296 Cn ...
^^ Bismuth-209 was long believed to be stable, due to its half-life of 2.01×10 19 years, which is more than a billion times the age of the universe. § Europium-151 and samarium-147 are primordial nuclides with very long half-lives of 4.62×10 18 years and 1.066×10 11 years, respectively.
It is an actinide and the heaviest element that can be formed by neutron bombardment of lighter elements, and hence the last element that can be prepared in macroscopic quantities, although pure fermium metal has not been prepared yet. [5] A total of 20 isotopes are known, with 257 Fm being the longest-lived with a half-life of 100.5 days.
Natural thorium is usually almost pure 232 Th, which is the longest-lived and most stable isotope of thorium, having a half-life comparable to the age of the universe. [27] Its radioactive decay is the largest single contributor to the Earth's internal heat ; the other major contributors are the shorter-lived primordial radionuclides, which are ...