the periodic tables island of stability
the island of stability located in the
uncharted regions of the lower periodic
table is hypothesized group of
superheavy elements that do not decay
despite their atomic weight whereas most
transuranic elements, elements that
almost never occur in nature,
decay too quickly and energetically to
be practically applied to much more
than atomic energy, elements in the
island of stability would, according to
theory, not decay and in addition would
have many other properties that would
make them useful for a number of
purposes to understand the island of
stability one has to understand atomic
structure and the reason behind atomic
decay. Atoms are comprised of protons,
neutrons, and electrons, the latter of the
three found in a cloud around the center
of the atom and the first two located in
the center known as the nucleus. Protons,
possessing a positive charge naturally
repel each other in the nucleus due to
the Coulomb force and have to be bound
in the nucleus by neutrons and the
nuclear strong force. As elements go
down the periodic table and the number
of protons and neutrons increases the
strong force required to hold the
protons in the nucleus also increases
and the elements become more and more
unstable if the repulsion of the protons
is too strong to be countered by the
strong force the atom can decay in
three different ways the first alpha
decay is an emission of two protons and
neutrons beta decay is an emission of an
electron or positron due to either protons or
neutrons being transformed into the
other and gamma decay is an emission of
energized photons the speed at which a
given amount of radioactive substance
decays is given by the half-life of the
substance, the time after which half of
the substance will remain and half of
the substance will have turned into
something else it logically follows that
as elements go down the periodic table
and become more radioactive they decay at a faster rate these ideas originated
in the latter half of the 19th
century with the studies of Henri
Becquerel, the Curies, Ernest Rutherford
and Hans Geiger and evolved throughout
the 20th century into what we know today
with the discovery and implementation of
nuclear fission in the nineteen thirties
and nineteen forties scientists
discovered that splitting the atom could
release the energy contained in the
nucleus to hold together the protons and
neutrons to create the second of the
bombs used in the bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, the Fat Man, scientists used
plutonium created by irradiating uranium
in a nuclear reactor plutonium the first
of the transuranic elements created by
humans gave rise to the idea that more
elements could be synthesized in
reactors one of the scientists key in
synthesizing the plutonium in the Fat
Man, Enrico Fermi, had come up with the
idea of transuranic elements in 1934
Glenn Seaborg, a scientist involved in
the Manhattan Project, continued his work
after the conclusion of the war and was
arguably the most important scientist
in the field of synthetic elements in
addition to helping discover plutonium
and neptunium Seaborg developed the idea
of the actinide and trans actinide
series and discovered ten new elements
at a younger age Seaborg had read many other
scientists' work on radiation and was
influenced by his time working on the
Manhattan Project he spent several years
teaching at UC Berkeley and used the
cyclotron at the Lawrence laboratory to
study synthetic radiation it was at this
laboratory that Seabog created many
new elements however Seaborg's
experiments ground to a halt when the
cyclotron was unable to create bigger
elements in the nineteen fifties
scientists introduced a new model of the
atom in which protons and neutrons were
organized in rings in the nucleus
similar to electron shells these shells
would be extremely stable when a so
called magical number of protons and
neutrons was packed into them
this prediction led seaboard to
postulate the existence of the island of
stability and a method of creating such
heavy atoms instead of adding individual
protons and neutrons Seaborg proposed
adding several of both at the same time
essentially smashing together elements
to see what would come out of them
Seaborg unfortunately suffered a stroke
before any new elements could be
synthesized by his friends or students
but in 1998 scientists at the Joint
Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia
in collaboration with American
researchers synthetically created
element 114 now known as flerovium
by fusing calcium 48 atoms with plutonium 244 later more isotopes of flerovium
created by altering the isotopes of
either calcium or plutonium used in the
reaction following the successful
creation of element 114 scientists in
Russia and America synthesized elements
115 and 116 and as recently as 2010 the
russian-american team has managed to
synthesize element 117 with Japan
claiming to have done it as well with
every new synthetic element scientists
bring the periodic table closer to the
hypothetical island of stability a
discovery that might truly change nuclear
physics as we know it
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