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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]
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 radioactive nuclides in the future.
Half-life (symbol t ½) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value.The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable atoms survive.
Besides 209 Bi, the most stable bismuth radioisotopes are 210m Bi with a half-life of 3.04 million years, 208 Bi with a half-life of 368,000 years and 207 Bi, with a half-life of 32.9 years, none of which occurs in nature. All other isotopes have half-lives under 1 year, most under a day.
The longest-lived radioisotopes are 135 Cs with a half-life of 1.33 million years, 137 Cs with a half-life of 30.1671 years and 134 Cs with a half-life of 2.0652 years. All other isotopes have half-lives less than 2 weeks, most under an hour.
There are 40 known isotopes of iodine (53 I) from 108 I to 147 I; all undergo radioactive decay except 127 I, which is stable. Iodine is thus a monoisotopic element.. Its longest-lived radioactive isotope, 129 I, has a half-life of 16.14 million years, which is far too short for it to exist as a primordial nuclide.
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 ...