Scientists have just created the world's lightest form of magnesium — a never-before-seen isotope with just six neutrons in its atomic nuclei — inside a giant atom smasher.
And while the substance disintegrates too quickly to be measured directly, the researchers expect their discovery will help scientists better understand how atoms are constructed. That's because such exotic isotopes — versions of chemical elements with either more or fewer neutrons in their nuclei than usual — can help define the limits of the models that scientists use to figure out how atoms work. "By testing these models in making them better and better we can extrapolate out to how things work where we can't measure them," said Kyle Brown, a chemist at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams at Michigan State University in East Lansing. "We're measuring the things we can measure to predict the things we can't." The new magnesium isotope — called magnesium-18 — won't fill all the gaps in scientific knowledge about atoms, but the discovery will help refine the theories that scientists have developed to explain them, he said. In particular, the team's measurements of the products of the isotope's radioactive decay give new insights into the binding energies of electrons that orbit a nucleus, according to a summary of the research. Read more...
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