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Long-lived Super Heavy Element Created
treeves writes "Radioactive nuclei that hang around for a mere half-minute before falling apart hardly seem stable. Yet compared with the fleeting lifetimes of their superheavy atomic neighbors, the roughly 30-second period that transpired from creation to disintegration of four atoms of a newly discovered isotope of element 108 qualifies those atoms as rock solid.
Theoretical physicists predicted years ago that some nuclei of elements much more massive than uranium should survive for a relatively long time — possibly long enough to probe their chemical properties — if they could be synthesized. On the chart of nuclides, theoreticians pinpointed a region with coordinates corresponding to 114 protons and 184 neutrons and indicated that nuclei with those "magic" numbers of subatomic particles should lie at the center of an island of stability. The nuclear longevity, according to the models, is due to the closing of proton and neutron shells, which renders the particles stable against spontaneous fission much the same way that a filled outer electron shell endows noble gases with chemical inertness. Experimentalists, though, haven't yet found a route to reach the center of the island."
let's cover the next warzone with depleted Hassium !
Money for nothing, pix for free
It is the entirely wrong time of day to try to comprehend this one.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Theoretical physicists predicted years ago that some nuclei of elements much more massive than uranium should survive for a relatively long time -- possibly long enough to probe their chemical properties -- if they could be synthesized
In the year 3000, all they'd have to do is follow Nibbler around with a pooper scooper.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Now is your chance to get the super amazing "30 Seconds to Massive Biceps" weight training program, with new enhanced dumbbells! No refunds after product has stabilized.
and i thought the professor was a cartoon character!!
That sounds kinda like an atomic bomb, why doesn't this stuff explode ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I'm not sure what the threshhold of detection is. But I imagine anything with a half-life under a few million years can't be detected in nature unless it's in a decay product chain of something considerably more stable.
Hey, I'm alive! Wow! This is fun! I've got 114 protons... ...and 184 neutrons! I'm surrounded by high-energy beams,
scientists, and a homolog. Uh, oh! Am I a volatile oxide?!
No, way! I'm being swept in to a multistage chromatographic
detector, which is cooled along its length in a gradient
from room temperature at one end to -150 degrees Centigrade
(at the other end). But I've done nothing wrong!!!
Sure, I've got similar nuclear properties to Hs-269, but
you've got the wrong isotope! Whoa, I'm feeling weird...
Kind of, uh, uhn, un-s-s-stable... I'm definitely --
KA-BOOOM!!!
THE END...?
(Coming up next: The somewhat longer, happier life of Gadolinium,
or Osmium -- I'm not sure, because I know nothing about this
part of the periodic table or nuclear physics!!! LOL!!!)
an international team of experimentalists has detected four of those atoms
What kind of equipment can detect these? Seems like it would be harder to detect them than to create them
The whole point of the article is that this element has a lifespan on the order of seconds, not milliseconds, which means that you can do chemistry and other fun things with them. But, really, people do this for two reasons: 1) to test the theories that predict a set of very heavy elements that are nearly stable and 2) because they can.
I like my beverages with warning labels!
Maybe this should have been: "...Island of Stability..." If you're visually inclined, check out the aptly illustrated "chart of nuclides," showing stability as a function of nucleon counts (i.e. proton and neutron counts).
Back when I was in high school, we'd have to share PC computers at 'computer science' classes, but 1 atom per six researchers.. er, couldn't we increase funding, or something?
This is the first real experiment that shows elements in the Island of Stability could be long-lived enough to be useful. A half-life of 30 seconds may sound short, but compared to the nanoseconds of heavy elements outside the island it's an eternity.
I confess ignorance as to what they do with these new things they invent. Is the idea that they get used in manufacturing or chemistry or some military use, or to make other elements?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
OK, I am missing something here...
:)
:)
For starters, I accept that they can do this but...
1. I thought Hydrogen (and deuterium) were the easiest atoms to fuse together (Call it a naive assumption if you like).
2. I also thought that these were incredibly hard to fuse together.
3. I also thought that even in a star, there is only enough energy to fuse atoms together up to Iron.
4. I also thought that you only get the energy needed to fuse atoms to form elements higher than Iron in a Supernova.
5. So I figured we'd not be able to harness the kinds of energy needed to fuse atoms this big.
6. I have just been watching Steven Hawkins series about all this shit over the xmas break
7. I did have rudimentary knowledge of all this stuff before watchign those shows.
So obviously we can create this kind of energy. I must have been confusing "not being able to fuse atoms together" with "not being able to fuse atoms together in an energy efficient manner" - i.e. the reason we dont get more out than in with our fusion energy attemts.
So if we can fuse hige Super Heavy atoms together, why can't we fuse lesser atoms together to make, say, gold?
I obviously have a flaw somewhere in my assumptions, if it's a simple one-liner, please tell me. Otherwise I will just go research it all again and find where I went wrong
Thanks for your time.
Tom...
For those of you who aren't theoretical physicists/chemists, another visualization for this Island of Stability is shown in a spiral periodic table. The predicted region of heavy elements that might be stable are labeled superlactindes and come off as a third arm.
As I understand it, fusion is necessary to have anything heavier than hydrogen. But you don't get substantial quantities of elements heavier than iron except from supernovas and perhaps some other high energy events (like what a neutron star can do). In particular, as far as we know, everything heavier than iron on Earth either came from one or more supernovas that preceded the existence of Earth or from decay products of those elements. Given the large amount of Uranium 235 and 238 in the Earth's crust, it's likely that all of the heavier elements and isotopes were created in some quantity. So my take is that there's an upper limit to the half life of these elements coming from the fact that we don't obvserve them in nature, but it's a weak limit many orders of magnitude off from what we're seeing in the labs.
So, how soon can we get Elerium-115 and start building UFO Defence ?
This reminds me of the book 'Nova' by Samuel R. Delany. The 'science portion of the book involves super-heavy elements that are stable created in a Nova, but very rare, used for interstellar engine fuel. Neat http://www.amazon.com/Nova-Samuel-R-Delany/dp/0375 706704/sr=1-1/qid=1167302216/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-9763 297-9839833?ie=UTF8&s=books
LRN 2 SWM
So if we can fuse hige Super Heavy atoms together, why can't we fuse lesser atoms together to make, say, gold?
We can. In fact, it was one of the first things we did with our new toys It's a fun game.
It's also very, very expensive.
KFG.
Very soon we'll have discovered Naquada!
Don't ask what that physicist was doing sneaking into the collidor with a pig's ear in his pocket if you're sensitive about where your tax dollars go.
But the purse is lovely.
KFG
Soon we'll be able to build an anti-gravity machine like that in all the alien flying machines! Bring on the Element 115.
The owls are not what they seem
IANAP (I am not a physicist) but I have studied some astronomy including reactions in stars.
Up to the iron group, fusion reactions are exothermic but produce increasingly less energy, so the higher the mass of the resulting element, the more reactions are needed to produce the energy required to sustain a star.
Reactions beyond the iron group are endothermic so require energy from the star to complete.
The other way elements are produced in stars is the addition of neutrons to already existing atoms, hence increasing their atomic mass and producing a different element. IIRC, the energy required to do this is high and exists only in stars.
There are two types of this reacton, slow and fast. Slow happens in the normal course of events of star evolution where fast happens in the seconds of life during and after a supernova. Elements such as uranium are produced during the fast process. From this, I think these guys have replicated one of the slow/fast addition processes rather than what we tend to call fusion.
As I say, IANAP but that's what I remember.
Reminds me of Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics.
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
Yet another new element to poison Russian spies with...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
In a recent press release, a major fast-food chain announced to have successfully created Long-lived Super Heavy Elements by changing the oil in their deep fryers to a healthier variety.
This would be the problem with all the Discovery Channel-based science: it has to be simplified to be more easily grasped and enjoyed by consumer TV audiences. Watching even Hawking's series will only give you but a brief primer into the subject which necessarily omits the more substantive basics in favour of pocket explainations for massively complex events, fusion and fission in star chemical synthesis being prime examples.
Your specific flaw in the above would be confusion in energy - there is a difference between 100 V at 1 A and 100 V at 10 A, though the electrical potential remained the same, and similarly with 1 V at 100 A and 100 V at 100 A, though current was the same. Likewise, we as a human species can create momentary bursts of temperature vastly exceeding the Sun, and momentary bursts of other energy forms (magnetic, kinetic, &c.) vastly exceeding the Sun as well. If you'll notice, the article states only 4 atoms were created, and this should give you some idea of how exactly 'momentary' our momentary bursts really are; energy efficiency is really not applicable as one quickly approaches 0.
If you're interested in this sort of business, a used high school-level chemistry text would be ah excellent tree to sniff round for the basics, which you could self-learn.
A radioactive nuclei half-life that lasts longer than it takes me to reach climax.
"treeves writes"... No, actually Mitch Jacoby of Chemical and Engineering News wrote that copy. Treeves merely copied it.
Professor: The atom is so rare that the nucleus alone is worth more than $50,000.
Bender: How much more?
Professor: $100,000.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Yeah I did the school stuff and did well at it, but that was like 17 years ago now so its all started to fade a bit since I switched from science to computers around then :-(
:) Now I need to un-learn all the stuff I explained* to my wife while we went through those shows over xmas. Its tough explainign all this stuff to someone who did not learn much about atoms and physics at school, but its a good chance to go through things in your own head again from the basics. Quite the challenge too after so long :)
I totally understand about the low duration bursts etc, I just think that, as you say, those shows glance over things too much and that may have just muddled things up in my head a bit this time round.
Thanks for all your responses, they have been helpful and I am back on track
*With those shows, I find myself doing about an hours of explaining for every 30 mins of show - really shows how much they assume/miss...
Naqahdah is real, they're just trying to think of a way to patent its uses so they can keep Cheyenne Mountain open!
The other way elements are produced in stars is the addition of neutrons to already existing atoms, hence increasing their atomic mass and producing a different element.
Do you mean protons, or are you meaning to say isotopes instead of elements?
IIRC, the energy required to do this is high and exists only in stars.
Neutron absorption occurs in fusion reactors (and is the reason that fusion reactors are still radioactive). Proton absoption occurs in fusion reactors too -- H ions are simply protons when they fuse.
IANAP (I am not a physicist)
If you need to explain what you mean with a given IANA* abbreviation, you probably shouldn't abbreviate it unless you're about to use it many times. Twice within a given posting does not count as "many."
Can you give a link to one of those?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Next time someone poisons a former spy we will know for sure who did it.
I'm not a physicist, and barely remember the difference between protons and neutrons. Really. Probably it's the way they choose the names, having nothing to do with the physical properties of the elements, and not even sounding cool. I mean, Uranium, Plutonium, Titanium have cool names. Krypton -- cool name. "Carbon" is at least descriptive, deriving from the Latin for burning. I've always thought "Gold", "Iron", and "Lead" were onomatopoeic. And everyone knows that "Sodium" is Greek for "soda pop". Good names, all, and they don't sound phake and made up.
But "Hassium"? "Bohrium"? Not cool, not descriptive. These are vanity names, like getting your name in a phony star registry, or some weak license plate, except it goes in the encyclopedia. Yes, I know there's this tradition for naming the radioactive ones after people, but that kind of thing ought to be left to the entomologists, hadn't it? I mean, what if there's a disaster, and Jonesium kills a bunch of people and gives the rest weird cancers? How will ol' Doc Jones feel about his legacy then, hmm? Better to be devoured by wasp larvae. So clearly, we need better, less risky names for these elements.
Let's see, an element that sticks around for 30 seconds and then goes away. I believe I can come up with a few right here, even without some fancy-shmancy degree:
-
Postite
- BlogTrollium
- Wevedoneitohnowehaventium (or Heybosslookatuhnevermindium)
- Anaviagrium
- Blinddatium
It's a wonder they don't put me in charge of much here at the gas station.sigs, as if you care.
Neutron absorption occurs in fusion reactors (and is the reason that fusion reactors are still radioactive). Proton absoption occurs in fusion reactors too -- H ions are simply protons when they fuse.
I take it you mean fission not fusion?
And yes, I did mean isotopes as in adding neutrons creates a different isotope. However, the level of study I covered did make it clear that the s and r processes result in the formation of different elements, not just different isotopes, but doesn't make it clear how the conversion of neutrons to protons occurs.
Once locked into an atom, I'm pretty sure neutrons become stable - when free they have a half-life of around 630 seconds.
I thought that joke was very funny. I guess the moderator didn't.
Experimentalists, though, haven't yet found a route to reach the center of the island."
I'm not really sure which would be more appropriate, Mapquest or Gamefaqs, but perhaps one of those will be able to give them proper directions.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Okay, nobody likes to think about fissionable rocket fuel, but maybe if you had a heavy element that could live even a few hours (long enough to be loaded into the rocket), then it might be worth using if its decay products are themselves short-lived and don't last long enough to threaten the environment.
Besides, a super-heavy fuel element would have higher energy storage density, and thus allow for a smaller/lighter reactor/engine. Hey, at least it's more plausible than that Hafnium isomer idea which didn't seem to pan out.
Heh, could they be used for superconductivity or something? Wouldn't that be a kicker -- "We've just found the first room temp superconductor, but it only has a half-life of 30 seconds!"
'Experimentalists, though, haven't yet found a route to reach the center of the island.'
Now we'll never save nano Gilligan!!!!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
This one looked interesting:
;P
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbihexium
So this ultra-heavy ultra-stable element corresponds to Element 126 on the periodic table, which was named as Kryptonite by Action Comics. Heh, cool bit of trivia. I wonder if this is just a coincidence, or if the Action Comics writer(s) knew about the Island of Stability (Fortress of Solitude?)
So, regarding the unbihexium I found linked to that wikipedia article
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbihexium )
Could this be used in Quantum Computing? Let's think for a moment, here. One of the problems with quantum computing is degeneracy/decoherence. But this thing is extremely stable. Given that it has a lot of electronic orbitals, I would imagine that its magnetic spin state would be particularly stable. Magnetic spin states tend to work by majority, so if you have a lot of electrons then that's a lot of spins to flip, and therefore
What about superconductivity? Could the fact that its spin state would be hard to flip mean that it could provide a more stable situation for electronic conduction band to be unmolested by magnetic variations/vortices? But then it would be too expensive (both energy-wise and cost-wise) to manufacture, to give us our happy energy-abundant economy. If anything, we would need an energy-abundant economy as a pre-requisite to be able to manufacture this super-heavy material in abundance.
But still, it creates food for thought...
Sigh. If only fusion would occur naturally. That would be just dreamy!
That reminds me of the 2005 Fundies Say The Darndest Things Post of the Year Award Winner:
"One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it."
If only fusion would occur naturally, I imagine it would supply quite a bit of energy. Maybe even supply enough energy to get that silly evolution theory to work. Alas, if there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it by now.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Once locked into an atom, I'm pretty sure neutrons become stable
No, that is only true if that nucleus itself is energetically stable. As Dragonslicer's grandparent post indicated, neutrons bound in a nucleus can into a proton if that decay carries the nucleus-as-a-whole energetically downhill. Protons in a nucleus can also change into a neutron (via electron capture) if it carries the nucleus-as-a-whole energetically downhill.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I think a critical issue you missed was absolute energy vs relative energy.
:)
fuse lesser atoms together to make, say, gold?
We can and do. If you burn all the oil on earth, you might just be able to make (one by one) enough atoms of gold to be able to see it as a speck of dust under a microscope.
If you could somehow grab onto a pair of atoms and precisely press them together, you could fuse any pair of nuclei together by pressing your thumb and finger together, and never even notice it.
Fusing any two nuclei takes a microscopic amount of absolute energy.
Moving down to the atomic level, there are the relative levels of microscopic energy. Fusing hydrogen (or more specifically deuterium and/or tritium) is the easiest fusion to do. It is like lifting one coin and stacking it on top of another coin, the smallest and easiest. A key point here is that they are magnetic coins... takes relatively small energy input to lift the coin and you get lots of magnetic energy and work coming out when they magnetically glue together.
Fusing two heavy atoms is like stacking one brick on top of another brick... better yet imagine standing a brick up the tall way and placing the other brick on top of it the tall way. It takes a (relatively) large amount of energy and work input to lift one brick and stack it on top of another one. And imagine there is still that same magnetic coin in the middle of each brick. The two magnets still attract each other, but you can't get any energy out. They are two small weak magnets and you had to do a relatively huge amount of work to lift one brick on top of the other one. Stacking magnetic coins releases magnetic energy (stars fuse up to iron), but you need to pay work to lift and stack bricks (above iron). And since the bricks are stacked the tall way, they are unstable. If they get bumped, the top brick will tip over and fall off... radioactive decay splitting them apart.
Getting magnetic coins to stack together is the easiest, all you need to do is shake the table a bit, but getting bricks to stack up is not very hard if you don't mind randomly blasting around "absolutely large" amounts of energy. You can create stacked bricks simply by slamming asteroids into the earth and then scan the entire planet looking for the four bricks that randomly got tossed up in the air and just happened to land on top of another brick. And that is a pretty good image of how these heavy atoms were fused. They burned a hundred barrels of oil or somesuch worth of energy to run a giant atomic-shotgun type machine, and then looked for the rare fluke heavy atoms that got lifted and stacked.
Fusing most super heavy atoms is usually more like lifting a telephone pole and standing it on top of other telephone pole, it is very tall and thin, it tips over and falls down in a millionth of a second. Microsecond radioactive decay. The "island of stability" they are hoping to reach is an atomic stack that is relatively "short and wide". You still need to spend energy to add work to build the stack.... meaning the stack doesn't generally happen in nature.... but if the stack is short and wide enough it will be reasonably stable... meaning it won't easily tip over and radioactively self destruct. Like stacking one pickup truck on top of another pickup truck. They won't fall apart like stacked telephone poles would. An atom with 114 protons and 184 neutrons would be uniquely short and wide, more like stacked pickup trucks than like stacked telephone poles.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I like your analogies. I think I will be using them on the wife. Ta!