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All of these super heavy elements are radioactive with short half lives, so they wouldn't be accessible as ores even on planets that formed close to these stars

All of these super heavy elements are radioactive with short half lives, so they wouldn't be accessible as ores even on planets that formed close to these stars. The article refers to elements with atomic weights higher than 260, which would mean elements like lawrencium and rutherfordium; they all have half lives of less than a day. I have had a related thought about uranium, though. The fissile isotope that's useful for power generation and bombs, uranium 235, is only about 0.7% of uranium that's found on Earth. When uranium is formed in a supernova, there's actually more uranium 235 produced than uranium 238; this freshly produced uranium is about 62% U-235 [1]. The reason that U-235 is so rare on Earth is that U-235 decays faster than U-238 and our uranium is billions of years old. But if it's possible for a technological civilization to develop on a planet with much fresher uranium content, natural uranium there could contain a double-digit percentage of U-235. Under those conditions it would be easy to accidentally discover nuclear fission and naturally occurring reactors like Oklo [2] would be common. [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/the-cosmic-origins-of-uranium.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c... [2] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-two-billion-year-old-only-known-natural-nuclear-reactor https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/meet-oklo-the-earths-tw...

chasil 3y ago
If the Cambrian explosion had happened sooner, then this would have been possible.
- cstross 3y ago
  The Cambrian explosion was, however, constrained by the partial pressure of oxygen in the hydrosphere (and, indirectly, the atmosphere). And free O2 couldn't begin to build up in seawater until after the Great Oxygen Catastrophe when the crust and upper mantle was finally fully oxidized, mopping up all the unoxidized iron and other elements. (Which in turn killed off almost all previous life forms, which were methanogenic and to which oxygen was a deadly poison/metabolic waste product.) The speed with which this happened was in turn constrained by tectonic subduction ... it all turns out to be a knotty ball of string that took at least a couple of billion years to unwind.
consp 3y ago
> they all have half lives less than a day. Isn't it the case it is currently not possible to create any neutron heavy isotopes and that causes the half-lives to be on the low end?
- philipkglass 3y ago
  Isn't it the case it is currently not possible to create any neutron heavy isotopes and that causes the half-lives to be on the low end? All of these isotopes are neutron-heavy. Lawrencium 261 has 103 protons and 158 neutrons, for example. In fact, the only stable isotopes with fewer neutrons than protons are helium 3 and ordinary hydrogen (protium).
  - saalweachter 3y ago
    I think he's referring to the way that eg lawrencium has a half-life that ~increases with the neutrons in the isotopes we've produced, from seconds for Lr-256 to hours for Lr-266. It isn't crazy to postulate, as a layman, that if we synthesized Lr-276, say, it might have a longer half-life. (Not that we expect that pattern to continue indefinitely, but still, have we discovered the most stable isotope of lawrencium yet?)
chorsestudios 3y ago
From [2] “ All natural uranium today contains 0.720% of U-235. If you were to extract it from the Earth’s crust, or from rocks from the moon or in meteorites, that’s what you would find. But that bit of rock from Oklo contained only 0.717%.” I find it interesting that the .003% difference in U-235 was a large enough deviation to attract attention to Oklo. Thanks for the link
- pests 3y ago
  I don't find it surprising at all considering how highly regulated anything involving uranium is: mining, storage, enrichment, actual use as weapons or power generators. Look what effort we went into the last two decades trying to stop Iran from developing their uranium enrichment infrastructure. Then back in WW2 we did a complete covert op to sabotage the heavy water (used in enrichment) generators in the mountains of Norway just to stop the Germans or Stalin from getting access to weapons grade material. Hell, they only even had some tons set aside by accident to enrich in the first place. Anyways, finding already fissled uranium material probably set off many alarm bells at the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission in 1972.
Beijinger 3y ago
"The article refers to elements with atomic weights higher than 260, which would mean elements like lawrencium and rutherfordium; they all have half lives of less than a day." Does the article really mean that? " r-process can produce atoms with an atomic mass of at LEAST 260 before they fission." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279166139_Charge_spectrum_of_superheavy_nuclei_of_galactic_cosmic_rays_obtained_in_the_OLIMPIA_experiment https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279166139_Charge_sp...
- adrian_b 3y ago
  According to current knowledge, the r-process can produce atoms with an atomic mass of at MOST 260, i.e. mainly up to fermium 257. Moreover, the nuclides with atomic mass close to 260, i.e. isotopes of einsteinium and fermium, would be produced in relatively small quantities in comparison with lighter elements. Exceeding 260 is highly improbable because such nuclei fission spontaneously extremely quickly, in milliseconds or microseconds, so the neutron flux would need to be much more intense than in nuclear explosions in order to produce a non-negligible equilibrium concentration. Most elements that are heavier than plutonium would decay before the materials containing them could aggregate into a planet (which may take at least a few million years). When the planets of the Solar System have formed, they probably still contained significant quantities of plutonium and neptunium, but then they have decayed quickly, leaving uranium as the heaviest surviving primordial element. While there might exist an island of stability for super-heavy nuclei of elements beyond any of those that have been synthesized artificially by ion collisions, for now there is no known natural process that could produce them in measurable quantities. By "stability" it is meant that the super-heavy elements might have lifetimes measured in years instead of milliseconds, not that they could be as stable as the already not very stable uranium or plutonium.

chasil 3y ago

If the Cambrian explosion had happened sooner, then this would have been possible.

cstross 3y ago
The Cambrian explosion was, however, constrained by the partial pressure of oxygen in the hydrosphere (and, indirectly, the atmosphere). And free O2 couldn't begin to build up in seawater until after the Great Oxygen Catastrophe when the crust and upper mantle was finally fully oxidized, mopping up all the unoxidized iron and other elements. (Which in turn killed off almost all previous life forms, which were methanogenic and to which oxygen was a deadly poison/metabolic waste product.) The speed with which this happened was in turn constrained by tectonic subduction ... it all turns out to be a knotty ball of string that took at least a couple of billion years to unwind.

consp 3y ago

> they all have half lives less than a day. Isn't it the case it is currently not possible to create any neutron heavy isotopes and that causes the half-lives to be on the low end?

philipkglass 3y ago
Isn't it the case it is currently not possible to create any neutron heavy isotopes and that causes the half-lives to be on the low end? All of these isotopes are neutron-heavy. Lawrencium 261 has 103 protons and 158 neutrons, for example. In fact, the only stable isotopes with fewer neutrons than protons are helium 3 and ordinary hydrogen (protium).
- saalweachter 3y ago
  I think he's referring to the way that eg lawrencium has a half-life that ~increases with the neutrons in the isotopes we've produced, from seconds for Lr-256 to hours for Lr-266. It isn't crazy to postulate, as a layman, that if we synthesized Lr-276, say, it might have a longer half-life. (Not that we expect that pattern to continue indefinitely, but still, have we discovered the most stable isotope of lawrencium yet?)

chorsestudios 3y ago

From [2] “ All natural uranium today contains 0.720% of U-235. If you were to extract it from the Earth’s crust, or from rocks from the moon or in meteorites, that’s what you would find. But that bit of rock from Oklo contained only 0.717%.” I find it interesting that the .003% difference in U-235 was a large enough deviation to attract attention to Oklo. Thanks for the link

pests 3y ago
I don't find it surprising at all considering how highly regulated anything involving uranium is: mining, storage, enrichment, actual use as weapons or power generators. Look what effort we went into the last two decades trying to stop Iran from developing their uranium enrichment infrastructure. Then back in WW2 we did a complete covert op to sabotage the heavy water (used in enrichment) generators in the mountains of Norway just to stop the Germans or Stalin from getting access to weapons grade material. Hell, they only even had some tons set aside by accident to enrich in the first place. Anyways, finding already fissled uranium material probably set off many alarm bells at the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission in 1972.

Beijinger 3y ago

"The article refers to elements with atomic weights higher than 260, which would mean elements like lawrencium and rutherfordium; they all have half lives of less than a day." Does the article really mean that? " r-process can produce atoms with an atomic mass of at LEAST 260 before they fission." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279166139_Charge_spectrum_of_superheavy_nuclei_of_galactic_cosmic_rays_obtained_in_the_OLIMPIA_experiment https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279166139_Charge_sp...

adrian_b 3y ago
According to current knowledge, the r-process can produce atoms with an atomic mass of at MOST 260, i.e. mainly up to fermium 257. Moreover, the nuclides with atomic mass close to 260, i.e. isotopes of einsteinium and fermium, would be produced in relatively small quantities in comparison with lighter elements. Exceeding 260 is highly improbable because such nuclei fission spontaneously extremely quickly, in milliseconds or microseconds, so the neutron flux would need to be much more intense than in nuclear explosions in order to produce a non-negligible equilibrium concentration. Most elements that are heavier than plutonium would decay before the materials containing them could aggregate into a planet (which may take at least a few million years). When the planets of the Solar System have formed, they probably still contained significant quantities of plutonium and neptunium, but then they have decayed quickly, leaving uranium as the heaviest surviving primordial element. While there might exist an island of stability for super-heavy nuclei of elements beyond any of those that have been synthesized artificially by ion collisions, for now there is no known natural process that could produce them in measurable quantities. By "stability" it is meant that the super-heavy elements might have lifetimes measured in years instead of milliseconds, not that they could be as stable as the already not very stable uranium or plutonium.