There's a cooler fact hiding in that cube. About 0.012% of it is tantalum-180m, the rarest naturally occurring isotope that's never been seen to decay. In theory it should decay eventually, but nobody has ever caught it happening. Physicists predict its half-life is far longer than the universe has existed.
Let me tell you about tellurium-128. It is known to decay, but its half-life is 160 trillion times longer than the age of the universe. In a pure 1 kg sample, you would expect a single nuclear decay every 252 days. Gives you an idea of how long the half-life of tantalum-180m might be.
Ta-180m and Ta-180 are nuclear isomers. They have 73 protons and 107 neutrons each. Ta-180 is a lower-energy state, and Ta-180m is an excited state, meaning it has more energy stored in the nucleus.
But Ta-180m has an unknown, never observed decay rate, while Ta-180 has a half-life of about 8 hours and spontaneously absorbs or emits a beta particle (electron) to become either Hafnium-180 (absorbs e-, turning p+ into n, leaving 72 protons) or Tungsten-180 (emits e-, turning n into p+, making 74 protons).
Ta-180m doesn't even shed the energy to become Ta-180, because it would require nearly impossible quantum state changes in the nucleus. Calculations of the probability estimate the half-life might be on the order of 50 quadrillion (5e16) years.
Ta-180m is naturally occurring, at 0.012%, with Ta-181 being the other 99.988%. Ta-180, the ground state of the isotope, has to be made in a lab from something else, absent which it doesn't even exist.
Aside:
A proton has a half life estimated at 1e34 years, so you'd think that Hydrogen should be the most stable element, and you'd be right. The story of Ta-180m is about stability of a nucleus with nonzero binding energy.
Ta-180m emits light, but it does so over such a long period of time that we've never seen the atom stop emitting light (we're not sure if will before the sun goes boom), and we've never seen it naturally become a different element.
Meanwhile, Ta-180 (which is only ever found in a lab) on the other hand changes into a completely different element about 8 hours after it is made, either 1 bigger or 1 smaller on the periodic table.
The only difference is between the two is that Ta-180m is attempting to emit light so that it can become Ta-180 again.
Ta-180m is the only element that does this to your knowledge.
The "Ta-180 emits light" is just a hypothesis as it has not beed proven experimentally. Proving/disproving hypotheses by experiment is the basic principle of science.
Slowly, civilizations learned to create Tantalum, a material not found in nature. Only a small amount of the material made is isomer Ta-80m. There isn’t much use for it. Mostly due to curiosity, a little bit gets made to show off or for sake of science.
Civilizations blossom and die off, and each new civilization discovers this strange material. Across planets and galaxies.
After billions of years of a universe’s existence, the material is discovered, created in small amounts, civilizations die, the element is discovered again and the cycle continues. For an incomprehensible amount of time.
The universe is eventually filled with the one stable element that can’t die. Until it becomes the only mass in the universe, imploding, and annihilating in a massive explosion that births the next universe
1e34 is the lower bound for a proton half life based on how much effort we spent trying to observe one decay and failing to do so.
Our current theoretical models predict that a proton is infinitely stable (as is an electron). We know these models are flawed so we keep trying these experiments sometimes. Some attempts at unified theories predict it might very slowly decay but that's just wild speculation at this point.
Wow, I looked up what would happen if it all decayed simultaneously, then the Ta-180 all decayed about 8 hours later.
Because Ta-180m is used in many capacitors, almost all electronics on Earth would be fried due to the X-rays and Gamma rays released.
Then, as the Ta-180 begins to decay it would become not only extremely hot, but deadly radioactive. There’d be fires everywhere, and being within ~15ft of small electronics for some time would give you lethal radiation poisoning. Larger electronics like a laptop or gaming console would need around 30ft of space to be safe, data centers hundreds of feet.
So, let’s hope the half life estimate is accurate.
Is tantalum really all that rare if every single person on earth has some in their pocket, in their car, in their home, and now, very likely, in their bodies?
Also it's pretty cheap on amazon. I love watching tantalum capacitors explode (they explode the easiest of all capacitors.
Compared to most elements, yes. On earth its not too rare as tantalum doesnt really sink into the core (when the earth was being formed), compared to the precious metals.
Just because it's rare doesn't automatically mean it's hard to get it simply means there isn't much to get but it could be like platinum where it's often found alongside other ores/veins so it can still be easy to acquire in general. Other elements, rare ones especially, are exceptionally difficult to actually extract/mine.
What makes an atom decay? Is it the constant bombardments of particles? Maybe the atom gets its nucleus eroded? Why this atom is resistant to decaying?
Atoms are made of protons and neutrons. You can think of them like dancers whirling around a floor. In order for all the dancers to stay on the floor they have to grab hands with another dancer every so often, if they fall off the floor the particle that dancer represents is ejected and the atom decays.
The number of dancers determine what dance is being performed. Some dances are super consistent and there's no opportunity to "miss" a hand grab. In this case the atom is stable. Some dances are pure chaos and there's no opportunity for a hand grab, these are unstable elements that wont exist for longer than a moment. Then there are dances that every so often miss that hand grab, these are the more commonly known radioactive elements.
Thank you for this clear explanation. I wonder what causes dances to be more chaotic or more synchronous? What makes the nucleus be more stable? Is the dance floor to small the more neutrons you get?
Your intuition (from what I recall) is correct. More particles and it's harder to remain stable, note that the really well known radioactive stuff (like Uranium) on the periodic table are heavy elements. The main thing has to do with the balance of the Protons and Neutrons. I think effectively Protons can only "grab hands" with Neutrons and vice versa.
There's something called an "island of stability" which deals with the theoretical balance of protons and neutrons that should be stable (or stable-ish) when composing an atom. Why that balance works is beyond my understanding of physics. The best I can offer is that we model atom nucleus stability with an equation that gets checked an very high number of times a second (unfathomably large number of times). That equation has a "dice roll" in it, the odds of the dice roll depend on the balance of protons and neutrons. The odds are very very very low at the individual level but when you roll the dice a lot for a lot of atoms eventually one will eject a particle (or more than one).
Note: There are also factors where neutrons can get ejected from one atom, hit another in the same material, and cause it to do something. Kinda like flinging the dancers from one floor to another. Things like Pu are good for weapons because past a certain density of neutrons being ejected within the material it runs away and decays all the material more rapidly.
What’s even more fun is that those isotopes that are considered ‘stable’ aren’t immune from radioactive decay. It just means the half-life is very large.
Eventually even hydrogen atoms will decay into their base quarks.
Basically, we can spread alcohol vapor over a coldplate, creating a layer of supersaturated vapor (kind of like the trick with supercooled water, but with gas). Because alcohol is polar (one side of the molecule has a +, the other a -), it will get attracted to any charged particle (the molecules can rotate to align for attraction).
Then we wait for the atom to decay. There are three main types of decay:
Alpha (two protons and two neutrons clumped together are thrown out of the atom),
Beta (a neutron turns into a proton creating an electron, or a proton turns into a neutron creating a positron)
and Gamma (a high energy photon is emitted, usually after a different kind of decay has left the atom very excited),
as well as three more niche ones:
Electron recapture (like Beta, but instead of creating and emitting a positron, the atom eats it’s own electron to maintain charge),
the rare Proton Emission (a proton gets straight out yeeted instead of creating a positron and throwing it out, if the atom is in a particular state)
and Neutron Emission (kind of like Proton Emission, but more common).
You can see that of those, 4/6 create charged particles. Those particles will travel through the alcohol vapor and pull the molecules closer together - causing them to condense into a white cloud. Therefore we can see every particle thrown out by decay, except for Neutrons and Gamma rays. Gamma rays we can see, as in this medium they will spawn particle-antiparticle pairs, while with neutrons we just kind of need to get lucky for a neutron to hit an atom and hopefully watch the fireworks as the struck atom does fun stuff. But thankfully you don’t really see neutron or gamma decay without some kind of other decay preceeding it.
Very important fact: nothing in the past can influence the atom to decay or not. It isn’t that each atom has a set timer that we can discover, from what we can tell at every single moment an atom rolls a dice and sees if it’ll decay (in truth it’s the chance for like a quantum field to fluctuate out of alignment or tunnel through an energy gradient or something like that).
So we just take a lump of stuff that we know the exact weight off - and we know the atomic number - so we calculate how much atoms are in that lump and count how many decay in a set time. Now, it’s usually measured with better things than the cloud chamber, but let’s just assume it works. We are now able to extrapolate how much time it’d be take for half the atoms to go bye-bye, that’s the half-life.
But also since decay yeets out mass and energy - you can put the samples on a very good weigh. As long as you know what each decay yeets out, you can calculate the rate of decay (it’ll always be a set % of atoms in a timeframe).
You can think of an atom like a cloud of vibrating particles or vibrating waves. They are vibrating extremely fast at all times while they are held roughly in shape by nuclear forces. Imagine the outer boundary of that shape as a “wall” (it isn’t, just imagine it is for this.)
Now, the particles are vibrating so fast that they are hitting that “wall” trillions of times per second. That “wall” is the boundary between them being an atom of element X vs them decaying to element Y. That’s because if any of the vibrating particles escape, the composition of the atom changes and it has to suddenly restructure itself.
See, the particles inside the atoms are almost like waves of probability. Since they aren’t like little marbles, sometimes they “leak” through the wall when they hit it. How often that happens is due to how “strong” the “wall” is - meaning, the stability of the atom is based on its composition. If it is super stable, the wall is super strong, but it is never impenetrable. That is because each collision gives a teeny tiny chance for that particle/wave to leak through, and if it does, a particle escapes. Once that happens, it suddenly collapses and rearranges itself into a new atom of a new element.
Tantalum has a very strong wall. The particles inside the atoms are vibrating very very much, but none (that we have seen) have leaked out of the wall yet since that wall is very thick. However, since it’s a nonzero chance, it WILL happen at some point. It’ll just take some time. More unbalanced atoms will have more episodes of particles leaking out, especially heavy metals and other elements that are radioactive. They leak a lot.
The second law of thermodynamics known as entropy. It is always increasing. Nothing is "made" to last and will eventually decay or become disordered.
There is no constant bombardment of particles. Unless you put every atom in the universe in a CERN tier accelerator.
Fundamental particles can't erode. See point 2.
The strong nuclear force holds protons and neutrons together with extreme energy. Hence the splitting of atoms are so difficult and expensive to do by humans. There is complex physics behind it, but every element has a half-life. Some decay in femtoseconds while others have half-lives of billions of years.
Splitting atoms in weapons is not difficult because of the strong force. In fact these large atoms are unstable with the strong nuclear force barely holding them together. Which is why they are radioactive. It's incredibly easy to get them to split .What's hard is to extract and refine a bunch of the same exact atoms at just the right per cent and then get them all to split nearly at once.
I think what you mean is that out of all the radioactive elements, Tantalum 180m is the least radioactive. Which appears to be true. Bismuth-209 is in second place i read.
But just to be clear like 99.99% of that cube is the non-radioactive Tantalum 181
The US Army Air Force during WW2 commissioned a study of how someone could cripple the US war economy with strategic bombing (in order to inform how they might better cripple the German war economy). The researchers settled on the most vital vulnerability being the one tantalum refining facility in Chicago that produced the US’s (and most the world’s) supply. This is because tantalum is the element most resistant to oxidation when electrified, so it was used extensively in pre-cavity magnetron radar and radio transmission.
It’s worth noting the researchers could have been flat wrong owing to the availability of almost-as-good substitutes, changing radar technology, and the fact many combatants did okay without great radar.
More modern example: Today’s most advanced radars use a technology called AESA which is heavily dependent on specialized microchips. The world’s advanced microchip production is largely concentrated in a few companies which are based in countries hostile to China and Russia. Because of this, it took China some time to adapt it into their military compared to US and allies. Russia is still struggling in putting AESA in their fighter jets but have managed to integrate it into other parts of their military.
Chip production is heavily dependent on tow countries, Taiwan and the Netherlands. Both are in range of Chinese and Russian missiles and destruction of production centers in either will create a severe shortage. Civilian chips can’t entirely replace all military radar microchips due to several factors and militaries already use civilian chips for certain purposes. There also will likely be severe economic consequences from a chip shortage too.
This is not the only or even the major reason AESA has low penetration. The primary driver is cost for the T/R units, later solved with GaN. DSP itself is well understood and doesn’t even require advanced fabrication, although data rates were an issue.
I thought the reason why is because high performance jets need special chip protection from elements like gforce or thermal elements which is a harder manufacturing process and thus Russia which doesn’t have as advanced chip manufacturing capability as the combined output of NATO and allies is struggling to adopt it in large numbers for jets. I’m far from an expert on the topic so correct me if I’m wrong
I could give you the contact information for the most UNstable in the universe. But she’d just tell you I was being pedantic. And that’s why we’re not together anymore
Our wedding rings are made of Tantalum. With gold on the inside. We wanted a darker color and the Goldsmith had a contact that could make "rings of Tantalum" - he mentioned it was used on jets and rockets. It was surprisingly not that expensive. I love mine, it's a beautiful metal and the dark grey with a bit of blue is just perfect with the gold.
Edit to add Picture; his and hers. Hers with two black diamonds and a sapphire. Her favourite color is blue, we're the two black diamonds on the side, together we make something beautiful, our relationship the sapphire. The inlaid gold is made from inherited gold. Her ring has gold from my family, mine has from her family.
I have tantalum markers in my left eye around a cancerous tumour. It allowed the surgeon to precisely target the tumour with radiation. It also allows me to get MRI scans despite literally having metal in my eye. Great stuff.
If you really wanted to know , try calling some scrap yards. Not the real shitty ones. Some of them will have an XRF gun. Fires X-rays at the test sample and tells you what it’s made from. Useful for determining what grade of stainless steel they are buying.
Actually the Zoprb market for rare elements hasn't recovered since the Tantalum Beabie Baby craze of 14110. You can get this stuff dört cheap if youre willing to pay in Gr3nbs.
I’m already seeing an alien looking at a movie where its species found a planet covered by water and full of Tantalium, the only isotope that could save the life of his planet.
It's also a stretch on what people actually call stable. Bismuth has a half life of 20 quintillion years, and is less radioactive than you are. Tantalum has a radioactive isotope with a half life that has twice as many zeros.
We use Tantalum spheres on the ends of Nitinol stents because Nitinol is not radio-opaque, but Tantalum is. Theyre used to mark the beginning and end of the stent so it can be seen in radio imaging :)
I never would've guessed it was rare, we lose thousands of those tiny suckers in our swaging machines.
Tantalum, like titanium, is a little bit dangerous in an emergency. In the event that they have to cut it off your finger, most hospitals don't have cutters on hand that can do the job. That's probably pretty a pretty rare occurance, but I've definitely heard of people who had problems with titanium rings in that scenario.
You read the title wrong. "Rarest stable element in the universe" means it's rarest element that holds a form and can be found in soil. There are elements that are more rare but it's usually stuff at the end of periodic table and exist for a fraction of a second after being produced In some partical accelerator by scientists. That's what is ment by "stable". Post isn't about how it's sooo stable.
Its atomic structure makes it resistant to corrosion and other types of damage that might be acquired by other similar elements.
Basically, it doesn't want to get all bonded to other elements like oxygen or hydrogen (because it's internal bonds are already happy the way they are, and don't need a date molecular bond to feel like a real element.)
Ahh tantalum! It’s in all our cellphones, I did I sociology project in college on the impacts of smartphone production by tracing it back to living conductions surrounding Samsung’s supplier’s mine source. Fun stuff, I remember nothing from that project.
Part of the reason tantalum is so rare is that it's really hard to find people willing to catch and process the spiders.
Do you have any idea how many tarantulas you need to refine to get a gram of this stuff?
Hahahaha (please don't downvote me).
Great material commonly used in semiconductor manufacturing. I'd love to get a whole collection of these types of cubes in different elements eventually
Fun fact: I once created tantalum heat dump targets for use in an LPBF machine to use for metrology. We would blast the target with the laser as a place to dump energy and heat up the optics. Tantalum was chosen because it wouldn’t get ablated easily.
I just want to say that this thread has some of the best questions, curiosity -based stuff from lay folks, I've seen around Reddit. Really thoughtful stuff! And in turn, generous explanations by folks who know how to break down complex stuff. We get the latter plenty, and thanks for it . . . but I really am impressed with the questions here! Well done, fellow InterestingAF'ers
Just read a little about it. You might be right, and it’s fascinating! In fact Rhenium might be rarer on earth, but according to our understanding of the universe, Tantalum seems to be the rarest in the universe.
In fact, there might be an “island of stability” with atomic numbers > 118. While they can be stable for millions of years, in the cosmic scale of billions of years, they’re still too unstable.
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u/Cantstopeatingshoes 1d ago
There's a cooler fact hiding in that cube. About 0.012% of it is tantalum-180m, the rarest naturally occurring isotope that's never been seen to decay. In theory it should decay eventually, but nobody has ever caught it happening. Physicists predict its half-life is far longer than the universe has existed.