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118 chemical elements are known to exist. All elements to element 94 are found in nature, and the remainder of the discovered elements are artificially produced, with isotopes all known to be highly radioactive with relatively short half-lives (see below). The elements in this list are ordered according to the lifetime of their most stable ...
In chemistry, chemical stability is the thermodynamic stability of a chemical system, in particular a chemical compound or a polymer. [1] Colloquially, it may instead refer to kinetic persistence , the shelf-life of a metastable substance or system; that is, the timescale over which it begins to degrade.
The discoverers of plutonium (element 94) considered naming it "ultimium", thinking it was the last. [18] Following the discoveries of heavier elements, of which some decayed in microseconds, it then seemed that instability with respect to spontaneous fission would limit the existence of heavier elements.
Of the 80 elements with at least one stable isotope, 26 have only one stable isotope. The mean number of stable isotopes for the 80 stable elements is 3.1 stable isotopes per element. The largest number of stable isotopes for a single element is 10 (for tin, element 50).
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 ...
In chemistry, the term chemically inert is used to describe a substance that is not chemically reactive. From a thermodynamic perspective, a substance is inert, or nonlabile , if it is thermodynamically unstable (positive standard Gibbs free energy of formation ) yet decomposes at a slow, or negligible rate.
This page lists radioactive nuclides by their half-life.
Promethium is one of the only two radioactive elements that are both preceded and followed in the periodic table by elements with stable forms, the other being technetium. Chemically, promethium is a lanthanide. Promethium shows only one stable oxidation state of +3.