Even if they're very stable, they're still not found naturally which means that they're either not that stable or not produced as part of some sort of stellar mass ejection, right?
Still very cool. I'm not one to piss on an idea because we have no practical way to produce in quantity on the horizon - the discovery itself is fascinating to me. But the conclusion of the article is kind of reaching, or just looking waaaay down the road.
Well everything we discover, it takes a little while to actually put that discovery to practical use. But interestingly enough, when it comes to atomic discoveries, practical application rapidly follows discovery. Rapidly as in, a few decades at most.
Unless we're talking extremely ancient terracotta pot type batteries as representing the discovery of electricity/electrons... because if we recognize that as an actual atomic discovery, then some discoveries might take a few hundred or thousand years to benefit everyday life.
However, I'd say elements in a supposed island of stability, if it exists, would also mean these elements ARE to be found
somewhere in the universe. In a significant, discoverable quantity? Who knows, not very likely. Most atomic matter consists of the far more simple ones. The more complex the atom, the less of it exists in the universe. Simple concept.
That means elements that are stable with a very high atomic number, after elements that are not stable at all... would likely mean their natural existence is unimaginably rare but also very likely to have been formed in natural conditions. If
we can form it, the early universe could. We just cannot match the amount of energy that can potentially exist, or at least at one point existed.
But the rarity of any elements in the island of stability would be very rare, to the point that mere atoms of the element likely have a rare chance of being found together in a measurable quantity, if found together at all.
Are we really going to find a invisible (to the naked eye) spec in a unimaginably large haystack?
This, of course, is going with the assumption that such an island of stability actually exists.
Such elements might not be found until we discover 50 more unstable elements. Wouldn't THAT just be interesting? There could even be a number of elements equal to the number stable elements known today that are unstable in increasing atomic number until they begin to return to stability. Might be awhile before we discover such elements if the latter is anywhere close to the truth.
But it would be indescribably amazing if such elements did indeed exist, and with their discovery brought a whole great deal of new information about elemental interaction and of what such elements could be capable.
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