Author: Carmen Drahl / Source: Science News
On the periodic table, most elements have at least one stable form. But others have only unstable forms, all of which decay by emitting radiation and transforming into different elements until becoming one that’s stable.
The timescale of radioactive decay is known as an element’s half-life, the time it takes for a sample of an element to be reduced by half.Generally for the elements after uranium, the further along they are on the periodic table — the higher their atomic number — the less time they last. Half-lives of unstable elements vary by nearly 30 orders of magnitude. For comparison, the Milky Way’s diameter is about 30 orders of magnitude larger than the width of a DNA helix.
The…
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