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I agree. Moreover, I'm not sure if it's the same team, but in a similar experiment while removing all the other effects, they discovered that Xenon 124 is radio
by gus_massa 2mo ago
I agree. Moreover, I'm not sure if it's the same team, but in a similar experiment while removing all the other effects, they discovered that Xenon 124 is radioactive, but the half life is super long and no one had seen it before. https://xenonexperiment.org/observing-the-rarest-decay-process-ever-measured/ https://xenonexperiment.org/observing-the-rarest-decay-proce...
- vintermann 2mo agoThat's a pretty cool discovery in its own right.
- jakzurr 2mo agoWow! That's in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon now. Xe-124, half-life 1.1 * 10^22 years. That's crazy.
- cogman10 2mo agoMakes me wonder if all atoms with 2+ nucleus elements (protons and neutrons) are radioactive but the halflife is so far out as to make something we'll never detect.
- marcosdumay 2mo agoThere's just no way deuterium is radioactive, unless hydrogen is radioactive too.
- gus_massa 2mo agoSome theories predict that protons decay, but the half life is like 1E31 or 1E35 years (compare to the Xe124 that has a half life of only 1E24 years). All experiments so far to measure the proton decay have failed, anyway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_decay I don't remember anything specific about deuterium, and the method that Xe124 uses is not available, and I can't imagine a razonable alternative method, so my guess is that deuterium is as stable as protons.
- gus_massa 1mo agoToo late to edit: Some conclusion, wrong number. The correct half life of Xe124 is 1E22, instead of 1E24.
- cwmma 2mo agoProbably not, they have a pretty good handle on why atoms decay, to the point they can predict some to be radioactive before it's actually observed to be (like Bismuth-209). Also even if something is REALLY REALLY long lasting, you can still check for the halflife by observing enough of it, they've been able to rule out proton halflives under 10^34 years (the universe is on the order of 10^10 years old) but by observing enough protons (like say 50,000 tons of water) you would expect at least some to decay.
- cogman10 2mo ago> they have a pretty good handle on why atoms decay Oh, they actually don't. Radioactive decay, AFAIK, is still an open physics mystery. We know it happens, we don't know why, what causes it, or if there even is a cause. We can predict factors that make it more likely. > to the point they can predict some to be radioactive before it's actually observed to be (like Bismuth-209). Right, but Xenon 124 wasn't predicted to be radioactive which is what makes it fascinating. It shows holes in what we can predict as being radioactive which is what makes me wonder about everything being radioactive but the timetable is too far out.
- mr_mitm 2mo agoWhere is the mystery? Any system can spontaneously transform into a new state with a probability greater than zero unless some conservation law prevents it. In a sense it's just quantum tunneling.
- baq 2mo agoThe mystery is the details, not in that it happens at all. Feel free to submit a paper if you have all the answers.
- mr_mitm 2mo agoCan you be more specific? I believe quantum mechanics explains all of radioactive decay. Unless the GP meant that QM is mysterious, I don't understand the problem.
- pfdietz 2mo agoThose double beta decays are also interesting because they can probe whether the neutrino is a Majorana particle.