First superheavy element found in nature
``The hunt for superheavy elements has focused banging
various heavy nuclei together and hoping they’ll stick.
In this way, physicists have extended the periodic table
by manufacturing elements 111, 112, 114, 116 and 118,
albeit for vanishingly small instants. Although none of
these elements is particularly long lived, they don’t
have progressively shorter lives and this is taken as
evidence that islands of nuclear stability exist out
there and that someday we’ll find stable superheavy
elements.
But if these superheavy nuclei are stable, why don’t we
find them already on Earth? Turns out we do; they’ve been
here all along. The news today is that a group led by
Amnon Marinov at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has
found the first naturally occuring superheavy nuclei [...]''
-
http://arxivblog.com/?p=385