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The radiation from curium is so strong that the metal glows purple in the dark. Curium is one of the most radioactive isolable elements. Its two most common isotopes 242 Cm and 244 Cm are strong alpha emitters (energy 6 MeV); they have fairly short half-lives, 162.8 days and 18.1 years, and give as much as 120 W/g and 3 W/g of heat, respectively.
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.
Contents. Isotopes of curium. Curium (96 Cm) is an artificial element with an atomic number of 96. Because it is an artificial element, a standard atomic weight cannot be given, and it has no stable isotopes. The first isotope synthesized was 242 Cm in 1944, which has 146 neutrons. There are 19 known radioisotopes ranging from 233 Cm to 251 Cm.
Table of nuclides. A table or chart of nuclides is a two-dimensional graph of isotopes of the elements, in which one axis represents the number of neutrons (symbol N) and the other represents the number of protons (atomic number, symbol Z) in the atomic nucleus. Each point plotted on the graph thus represents a nuclide of a known or ...
A radionuclide (radioactive nuclide, radioisotope or radioactive isotope) is a nuclide that has excess numbers of either neutrons or protons, giving it excess nuclear energy, and making it unstable. This excess energy can be used in one of three ways: emitted from the nucleus as gamma radiation; transferred to one of its electrons to release it ...
Curium metal is a radionuclide and emits alpha particles upon radioactive decay. [12] Although it has a half life of 34 ms, many curium oxides, including curium sesquioxide, have half lives nearing thousands of years. [7] Curium, in the form of curium sesquioxide, can be inhaled into the body, causing many biological defects.
In nuclear science a decay chain refers to the predictable series of radioactive disintegrations undergone by the nuclei of certain unstable chemical elements. Radioactive isotopes do not usually decay directly to stable isotopes, but rather into another radioisotope. The isotope produced by this radioactive emission then decays into another ...
There are 251 known so-called stable nuclides. Many of these in theory could decay through spontaneous fission, alpha decay, double beta decay, etc. with a very long half-life, but no radioactive decay has yet been observed. Thus, the number of stable nuclides is subject to change if some of these 251 are determined to be very long-lived ...