Which is the heaviest naturally occurring element?
"Uranium is a naturally occurring element that can be found in low levels within all rock, soil, and water. Uranium is the 51st element in order of abundance in the Earth's crust. Uranium is also the highest-numbered element to be found naturally in significant quantities on Earth and is almost always found combined with other elements. The decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium-40 in the Earth's mantle is thought to be the main source of heat that keeps the outer core liquid and drives mantle convection, which in turn drives plate tectonics. Uranium's average concentration in the Earth's crust is"
"always considered on par with the 80 stable elements. The very heaviest elements (those beyond plutonium, element 94) undergo radioactive decay with half-lives so short that they are not found in nature and must be synthesized. As of 2010, there are 118 known elements (in this context, ""known"" means observed well enough, even from just a few decay products, to have been differentiated from other elements). Of these 118 elements, 94 occur naturally on Earth. Six of these occur in extreme trace quantities: technetium, atomic number 43; promethium, number 61; astatine, number 85; francium, number 87; neptunium, number 93; and"
"February 2010. The heaviest element that is believed to have been synthesized to date is element 118, oganesson, on 9 October 2006, by the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions in Dubna, Russia. Tennessine, element 117 was the latest element claimed to be discovered, in 2009. On 28 November 2016, scientists at the IUPAC officially recognized the names for four of the newest chemical elements, with atomic numbers 113, 115, 117, and 118. The following sortable table shows the 118 known chemical elements. Chemical element A chemical element is a species of atoms having the same number of protons in their"
"nonmetal. Of the three heaviest elements with biological roles, two (molybdenum and iodine) are in this period; tungsten, in period 6, is heavier, along with several of the early lanthanides. Period 5 also includes technetium, the lightest exclusively radioactive element. Period 6 is the first period to include the f-block, with the lanthanides (also known as the rare earth elements), and includes the heaviest stable elements. Many of these heavy metals are toxic and some are radioactive, but platinum and gold are largely inert. All elements of period 7 are radioactive. This period contains the heaviest element which occurs naturally"
"limited investigation of dubnium chemistry has confirmed this. Solution chemistry experiments have revealed that dubnium often behaves more like niobium rather than tantalum, breaking periodic trends. Uranium, element 92, is the heaviest element to occur in significant quantity in nature; heavier elements can only be produced practically by synthesis. The first synthesis of a new element—neptunium, element 93—was achieved in 1940 by a team of researchers in the United States. In the following years, American scientists synthesized the elements up to mendelevium, element 101, which was synthesized in 1955. From element 102, the priority of discoveries was contested between American"
"all the time because of cosmic radiation. For carbon-14 this fact has practice value because it is used for radiocarbon dating. Natural isotopes Natural isotopes are either stable isotopes, radioactive isotopes that have a sufficiently long half-life to allow them to exist in substantial concentrations in the Earth (e.g. bismuth-209, with a half-life of 1.9 * 10 years, potassium-40 with a half-life of 1.251(3)×10 y), daughter products of those isotopes (e.g. Th, with a half-life of 24 days) or cosmogenic elements. The heaviest stable isotope is lead-208, but the heaviest 'natural' isotope is U-238. Many elements have both natural and"
"the discovery of the heaviest elements in the periodic table. It is one of only two elements named after a person who was alive at the time of naming, the other being seaborgium; it is also the only element whose namesake is alive today. Oganesson has the highest atomic number and highest atomic mass of all known elements. The radioactive oganesson atom is very unstable, and since 2005, only five (possibly six) atoms of the nuclide Og have been detected. Although this allowed very little experimental characterization of its properties and possible compounds, theoretical calculations have resulted in many predictions,"
"Natural isotopes Natural isotopes are either stable isotopes, radioactive isotopes that have a sufficiently long half-life to allow them to exist in substantial concentrations in the Earth (e.g. bismuth-209, with a half-life of 1.9 * 10 years, potassium-40 with a half-life of 1.251(3)×10 y), daughter products of those isotopes (e.g. Th, with a half-life of 24 days) or cosmogenic elements. The heaviest stable isotope is lead-208, but the heaviest 'natural' isotope is U-238. Many elements have both natural and artificial isotopes (e.g. hydrogen has three natural isotopes and another four known artificial isotopes). A further distinction among stable natural isotopes"
"heavier chemical elements in the known existing universe, and continues to take place to this day, creating the vast majority of the most common elements in the universe, including helium, oxygen and carbon. Most stars carry out transmutation through fusion reactions involving hydrogen and helium, while much larger stars are also capable of fusing heavier elements up to iron late in their evolution. Elements heavier than iron, such as gold and lead, are created through elemental transmutations that can only take place in supernovae - as stars begin to fuse heavier elements, substantially less energy is released from each fusion"
"to oganesson (95–118), occur only when synthesized in laboratories. Of the 94 naturally occurring elements, 83 are primordial and 11 occur only in decay chains of primordial elements. No element heavier than einsteinium (element 99) has ever been observed in macroscopic quantities in its pure form, nor has astatine (element 85); francium (element 87) has been only photographed in the form of light emitted from microscopic quantities (300,000 atoms). A ""group"" or ""family"" is a vertical column in the periodic table. Groups usually have more significant periodic trends than periods and blocks, explained below. Modern quantum mechanical theories of atomic"
"support a neutron-mediated chain reaction). Uranium, thorium, and potassium are the main elements contributing to natural terrestrial radioactivity. Uranium has the highest atomic weight of the naturally occurring elements and is approximately 70% denser than lead, but not as dense as tungsten, gold, platinum, iridium, or osmium. It is always found combined with other elements. Along with all elements having atomic weights higher than that of iron, it is only naturally formed in supernova explosions. The primary uranium ore mineral is uraninite (UO) (previously known as pitchblende). A range of other uranium minerals can be found in various deposits. These"
"is the most stable element that can easily be made from alpha particles (being a product of decay of radioactive nickel-56, ultimately made from 14 helium nuclei). Elements heavier than iron are made in energy-absorbing processes in large stars, and their abundance in the universe (and on Earth) generally decreases with their atomic number. The abundance of the chemical elements on Earth varies from air to crust to ocean, and in various types of life. The abundance of elements in Earth's crust differs from that in the Solar system (as seen in the Sun and heavy planets like Jupiter) mainly"
"Fermium Fermium is a synthetic element with symbol Fm and atomic number 100. It is an actinide and the heaviest element that can be formed by neutron bombardment of lighter elements, and hence the last element that can be prepared in macroscopic quantities, although pure fermium metal has not yet been prepared. A total of 19 isotopes are known, with Fm being the longest-lived with a half-life of 100.5 days. It was discovered in the debris of the first hydrogen bomb explosion in 1952, and named after Enrico Fermi, one of the pioneers of nuclear physics. Its chemistry is typical"
"the most abundant (68.077% natural abundance). Isotopes heavier than cannot be formed by nuclear fusion without losing energy. Nickel-62 has the highest mean nuclear binding energy per nucleon of any nuclide, at 8.7946 MeV/nucleon. Its binding energy is greater than both and , more abundant elements often incorrectly cited as having the most tightly-bound nuclides. Although this would seem to predict nickel-62 as the most abundant heavy element in the universe, the relatively high rate of photodisintegration of nickel in stellar interiors causes iron to be by far the most abundant. Stable isotope nickel-60 is the daughter product of the"
"the current heaviest element known, oganesson. In 1787, Swedish part-time chemist Carl Axel Arrhenius found a heavy black rock near the Swedish village of Ytterby, Sweden (part of the Stockholm Archipelago). Thinking that it was an unknown mineral containing the newly discovered element tungsten, he named it ytterbite. Finnish scientist Johan Gadolin identified a new oxide or ""earth"" in Arrhenius' sample in 1789, and published his completed analysis in 1794; in 1797, the new oxide was named ""yttria"". In the decades after French scientist Antoine Lavoisier developed the first modern definition of chemical elements, it was believed that earths could"
"Hydrogen Hydrogen is a chemical element with symbol H and atomic number 1. With a standard atomic weight of , hydrogen is the lightest element on the periodic table. Its monatomic form (H) is the most abundant chemical substance in the Universe, constituting roughly 75% of all baryonic mass. Non-remnant stars are mainly composed of hydrogen in the plasma state. The most common isotope of hydrogen, termed ""protium"" (name rarely used, symbol H), has one proton and no neutrons. The universal emergence of atomic hydrogen first occurred during the recombination epoch. At standard temperature and pressure, hydrogen is a colorless,"
"Iodine Iodine is a chemical element with symbol I and atomic number 53. The heaviest of the stable halogens, it exists as a lustrous, purple-black non-metallic solid at standard conditions that sublimes readily to form a violet gas. The elemental form was discovered by the French chemist Bernard Courtois in 1811. It was named two years later by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac from this property, after the Greek ""ἰώδης"" ""violet-coloured"". Iodine occurs in many oxidation states, including iodide (I), iodate (), and the various periodate anions. It is the least abundant of the stable halogens, being the sixty-first most abundant element."
"is observed today (3 parts hydrogen to 1 part helium-4 by mass), with nearly all the neutrons in the universe trapped in helium-4. All heavier elements (including those necessary for rocky planets like the Earth, and for carbon-based or other life) have thus been created since the Big Bang in stars which were hot enough to fuse helium itself. All elements other than hydrogen and helium today account for only 2% of the mass of atomic matter in the universe. Helium-4, by contrast, makes up about 23% of the universe's ordinary matter—nearly all the ordinary matter that is not hydrogen."
"the heaviest stable nuclide with the same number of neutrons and protons; (theoretically, the heaviest stable one is sulfur-32). All stable nuclides heavier than calcium-40 contain more neutrons than protons. Of the 80 elements with a stable isotope, the largest number of stable isotopes observed for any element is ten (for the element tin). No element has nine stable isotopes. Xenon is the only element with eight stable isotopes. Four elements have seven stable isotopes, eight have six stable isotopes, ten have five stable isotopes, nine have four stable isotopes, five have three stable isotopes, 16 have two stable isotopes"
"Tennessine Tennessine is a synthetic chemical element with symbol Ts and atomic number 117. It is the second-heaviest known element and the penultimate element of the 7th period of the periodic table. The discovery of tennessine was officially announced in Dubna, Russia, by a Russian–American collaboration in April 2010, which makes it the most recently discovered element . One of its daughter isotopes was created directly in 2011, partially confirming the results of the experiment. The experiment itself was repeated successfully by the same collaboration in 2012 and by a joint German–American team in May 2014. In December 2015, the"
"than the current estimated age of the universe, bismuth-209 has the longest known alpha decay half-life of any naturally occurring element. The very heaviest 24 elements (those beyond plutonium, element 94) undergo radioactive decay with short half-lives and cannot be produced as daughters of longer-lived elements, and thus they do not occur in nature at all. The properties of the chemical elements are often summarized using the periodic table, which powerfully and elegantly organizes the elements by increasing atomic number into rows (""periods"") in which the columns (""groups"") share recurring (""periodic"") physical and chemical properties. The current standard table contains"
"Helium Helium (from ) is a chemical element with symbol He and atomic number 2. It is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, inert, monatomic gas, the first in the noble gas group in the periodic table. Its boiling point is the lowest among all the elements. After hydrogen, helium is the second lightest and second most abundant element in the observable universe, being present at about 24% of the total elemental mass, which is more than 12 times the mass of all the heavier elements combined. Its abundance is similar to this figure in the Sun and in Jupiter. This"
"the softest known substances, and diamond, the hardest naturally occurring substance. It bonds readily with other small atoms, including other carbon atoms, and is capable of forming multiple stable covalent bonds with suitable multivalent atoms. Carbon is known to form almost ten million different compounds, a large majority of all chemical compounds. Carbon also has the highest sublimation point of all elements. At atmospheric pressure it has no melting point, as its triple point is at and , so it sublimes at about 3,900 K. Graphite is much more reactive than diamond at standard conditions, despite being more thermodynamically stable,"
"All heavier elements - including those necessary for rocky planets like the Earth, and for carbon-based or other life - have thus had to be produced, since the Big Bang, in stars which were hot enough to fuse not just hydrogen (for this produces only more helium), but to fuse helium itself. All elements other than hydrogen and helium today account for only 2% of the mass of atomic matter in the universe. Helium-4, by contrast, makes up about 23% of the universe's ordinary matter — nearly all the ordinary matter that isn't hydrogen. Helium-4 Helium-4 (' or ') is"
"of stable elements occur naturally on Earth in multiple stable isotopes, with the largest number of stable isotopes for an element being ten, for tin (). There are about 94 elements found naturally on Earth (up to plutonium inclusive), though some are detected only in very tiny amounts, such as plutonium-244. Scientists estimate that the elements that occur naturally on Earth (some only as radioisotopes) occur as 339 isotopes (nuclides) in total. Only 253 of these naturally occurring nuclides are stable in the sense of never having been observed to decay as of the present time. An additional 35 primordial"
"the heaviest stable isotope made of the same number of protons and neutrons. Both calcium-48 and nickel-48 are double magic because calcium-48 has 20 protons and 28 neutrons while nickel-48 has 28 protons and 20 neutrons. Calcium-48 is very neutron-rich for such a light element, but like calcium-40, it is made stable by being double magic. Magic number shell effects are seen in ordinary abundances of elements: helium-4 is among the most abundant (and stable) nuclei in the universe and lead-208 is the heaviest stable nuclide. Magic effects can keep unstable nuclides from decaying as rapidly as would otherwise be"
"CeF. Naturally occurring terbium is composed of its only stable isotope, terbium-159; the element is thus called mononuclidic and monoisotopic. Thirty-six radioisotopes have been characterized, with the heaviest being terbium-171 (with atomic mass of 170.95330(86) u) and lightest being terbium-135 (exact mass unknown). The most stable synthetic radioisotopes of terbium are terbium-158, with a half-life of 180 years, and terbium-157, with a half-life of 71 years. All of the remaining radioactive isotopes have half-lives that are much less than a quarter of a year, and the majority of these have half-lives that are less than half a minute. The primary"
"Astatine Astatine is a radioactive chemical element with symbol At and atomic number 85. It is the rarest naturally occurring element in the Earth's crust, occurring only as the decay product of various heavier elements. All of astatine's isotopes are short-lived; the most stable is astatine-210, with a half-life of 8.1 hours. A sample of the pure element has never been assembled, because any macroscopic specimen would be immediately vaporized by the heat of its own radioactivity. The bulk properties of astatine are not known with any certainty. Many of them have been estimated based on the element's position on"
"different proportions of elements that are formed during spontaneous fission, such as krypton, zirconium, and xenon. Thus, the occurrence of hassium in nature in minerals such as molybdenite and osmiride is theoretically possible, but highly unlikely. Hassium has no stable or naturally occurring isotopes. Several radioactive isotopes have been synthesized in the laboratory, either by fusing two atoms or by observing the decay of heavier elements. Twelve different isotopes have been reported with atomic masses from 263 to 277 (with the exceptions of 272, 274, and 276), three of which, hassium-265, hassium-267, hassium-269, have known metastable states. Most of these"
"spontaneously break up too quickly to appear in nature as primordial elements, though they can be produced artificially or as intermediates in the decay chains of lighter elements. Generally, the heavier the nuclei are, the faster they spontaneously decay. Iron nuclei are the most stable nuclei (in particular iron-56), and the best sources of energy are therefore nuclei whose weights are as far removed from iron as possible. One can combine the lightest ones—nuclei of hydrogen (protons)—to form nuclei of helium, and that is how the Sun generates its energy. Or else one can break up the heaviest ones—nuclei of"
"to the heaviest known element, oganesson (118). The longest-lived observed isotopes of each of the heaviest elements are shown in the following table. The half-lives of nuclei in the island of stability itself are unknown since none of the nuclides that would be ""on the island"" have been observed. Many physicists think they are relatively short, on the order of minutes or days. Some theoretical calculations indicate that their half-lives may be long, on the order of 10 years. The alpha-decay half-lives of 1700 nuclei with 100 ≤ Z ≤ 130 have been calculated in a quantum tunneling model with"
"and then slowly decreases again, and also a narrow isolated peak at helium, which as noted is very stable. The heaviest nuclei in nature, uranium U, are unstable, but having a half-life of 4.5 billion years, close to the age of the Earth, they are still relatively abundant; they (and other nuclei heavier than helium) have formed in stellar evolution events like supernova explosions preceding the formation of the solar system. The most common isotope of thorium, Th, also undergoes alpha particle emission, and its half-life (time over which half a number of atomformula_1s decays) is even longer, by several"
"of the volatile elements hydrogen, helium, neon, and nitrogen, as well as carbon which has been lost as volatile hydrocarbons. The remaining elemental composition is roughly typical of the ""rocky"" inner planets, which formed in the thermal zone where solar heat drove volatile compounds into space. The Earth retains oxygen as the second-largest component of its mass (and largest atomic-fraction), mainly from this element being retained in silicate minerals which have a very high melting point and low vapor pressure. The mass-abundance of the nine most abundant elements in the Earth's crust is approximately: oxygen 46%, silicon 28%, aluminum 8.2%,"