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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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
The most common isotope of hydrogen (protium, 1 H) consists of one proton, one electron, and no neutrons. In the early universe , the formation of hydrogen's protons occurred in the first second after the Big Bang ; neutral hydrogen atoms only formed about 370,000 years later during the recombination epoch as the universe cooled and plasma had ...