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Stable Roentgenium Claimed Found In Gold
eldavojohn writes "Amnon Marinov, a physicist specializing in super heavy elements, claims that a stable isotope of roentgenium is commonly found alongside gold, just in very small quantities that we could not measure before. To prove this, he boiled gold in a vacuum, postulating that as the gold evaporated, the roentgenium should remain. He did this for two weeks and then passed the resulting mess through a mass spectrometer and was left with several peaks that could be explained away except for one. Marinov lead the team that found the first super heavy 122 thorium isotope in nature a few years back and now claims that, despite all indications that this super heavy element shouldn't exist longer than a few seconds, he has found a stable isomer of roentgenium in nature. Is he on to something, or overlooking a simpler explanation in his quest for evidence of the island of stability long theorized by physicists?"
Roentgenium is element #111, right below gold on the periodic table, and well within the zone of "highly unstable elements". Not just "unstable" - it's well into the group of elements that decay in seconds. The most stable isotope discovered so far, Rg 281, has a half-life of just 20 seconds. So I have some doubts about this - every other "stable transuranic element" story I've heard ended up being a mistake or a hoax.
I'm also wondering how Marinov suspected it would be in gold. The only link I can find is that they're both group 11 elements, but by that logic you should be able to find tellurium in sulfur, which isn't the case.