Japanese physicists have discovered two new isotopes of oxygen, but their behavior is not consistent with existing theories.
Scientists from the RIKEN Research Institute in Japan conducted an experiment in the cyclotron accelerator designed to create unstable isotopes of chemical elements. As a result, they discovered two previously unknown isotopes of oxygen. Oxygen-28, which is also one of the isotopes, has the largest number of neutrons in the nucleus of the oxygen atom ever observed. ScienceAlert writes that although scientists believe this isotope should be stable, it actually decays rapidly.
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Atomic nuclei are made up of protons and neutrons. The oxygen atom has 8 protons in its nucleus, which determines its atomic number, and this applies to all chemical elements. But the number of neutrons in the nucleus of an element atom can be different. Such elements are called isotopes of a particular chemical element. Isotopes have their own number and are determined by the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus of their atoms. For example, before that, oxygen-26 was thought to be the oxygen isotope with the largest number of neutrons. This means that there are 8 protons (as in the nucleus of an oxygen atom) and 18 neutrons in the nucleus of an atom.
However, Japanese scientists, who presented the results of their work in the journal Nature, were able to detect two isotopes of oxygen during experiments that had not been observed before. Oxygen-27 has 19 neutrons and oxygen-28 has 20 neutrons in the nucleus of an atom. So the latter is the oxygen isotope with the highest neutron count known to scientists.
Although physicists assumed that such isotopes could exist, they believed they must be stable isotopes of oxygen. However, it turned out that both elements decayed into oxygen-24 in less than a second.
Scientists will do more research to understand why both isotopes are unstable and may have to revise some physical theories. By the way, almost all the oxygen on Earth, including the one we breathe, is an isotope of oxygen -16, which has 8 protons and 8 neutrons in its nucleus.
As I already wrote FocusPhysicists at the Large Hadron Collider have discovered a rare type of particle. As a result of proton collisions in a particle accelerator, physicists have discovered rare hypernuclei.
Moreover Focus He wrote that for the first time scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have been able to detect an elusive particle like the neutrino. Although neutrinos are the most common particles in the universe, so far they have not been able to detect their presence in a particle accelerator.
Source: Focus
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