Something I've been curious about lately is: why do we find elements on Earth clumped together, for example veins of iron or gold? I can understand coal or oil since that comes from something organic that put it there. But what about elemental substances? When I throw stuff into my blender or spice mixer it gets pretty homogeneous. Surely an exploding star ought to mix things up better than that. So is there something that brings the iron & gold back together again? I don't know if this is a question for an astrophysicist, chemist, or geologist, but I suppose HN has all three. :-)
Still rooting for an Island of Stability: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability</a>
The headline goes a bit far. They postulate that some elements, e.g. silver, are the result of the fission of extraordinarily high atomic number elements. There are no actual observations of such elements.
Just today I was listening to this very nice podcast on the subject: [0]<p>[0] <a href="https://podverse.fm/episode/HCgiHwGBC" rel="nofollow">https://podverse.fm/episode/HCgiHwGBC</a>
The paper on archive: <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06844" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.06844</a>
There's some cool science fiction / conspiracy theory out there about antimatter reactors and stable Moscovium 115. Our part of the galaxy is a desert for stable heavy elements.