{"id":144208,"date":"2022-08-16T00:53:34","date_gmt":"2022-08-16T05:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/scientists-measure-half-life-of-element-thats-longer-than-the-age-of-the-universe"},"modified":"2022-08-16T00:53:34","modified_gmt":"2022-08-16T05:53:34","slug":"scientists-measure-half-life-of-element-thats-longer-than-the-age-of-the-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/scientists-measure-half-life-of-element-thats-longer-than-the-age-of-the-universe","title":{"rendered":"Scientists measure half-life of element that\u2019s longer than the age of the universe"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/scientists-measure-half-life-of-element-thats-longer-than-the-age-of-the-universe2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Circa 2019 This could lead to reactors that last nearly forever and spaceships that do not run out of fuel.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Deep under an Italian mountainside, a giant detector filled with tons of liquid xenon has been looking for dark matter\u2014particles of a mysterious substance whose effects we can see in the universe, but which no one has ever directly observed. Along the way, however, the detector caught another scientific unicorn: the decay of atoms of xenon-124\u2014the rarest process ever observed in the universe.<\/p>\n<p>The results from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.xenon1t.org\/\">XENON1T experiment<\/a>, co-authored by University of Chicago scientists and published April 25 in the journal <em>Nature, <\/em>document the longest half-life in the universe\u2014and may be able to help scientists hunt for another mysterious process that is one of particle physics\u2019 great mysteries.<\/p>\n<p>Not all atoms are stable. Depending on their makeup, some will stabilize themselves by releasing subatomic particles and turning into an atom of a different element\u2014a process called radioactive decay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Circa 2019 This could lead to reactors that last nearly forever and spaceships that do not run out of fuel. Deep under an Italian mountainside, a giant detector filled with tons of liquid xenon has been looking for dark matter\u2014particles of a mysterious substance whose effects we can see in the universe, but which no [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144208"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144208\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}