{"id":89956,"date":"2019-04-25T11:02:24","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T18:02:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/researchers-just-measured-an-atom-with-a-half-life-of-18-sextillion-years"},"modified":"2019-04-25T11:02:24","modified_gmt":"2019-04-25T18:02:24","slug":"researchers-just-measured-an-atom-with-a-half-life-of-18-sextillion-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/04\/researchers-just-measured-an-atom-with-a-half-life-of-18-sextillion-years","title":{"rendered":"Researchers Just Measured an Atom with a Half-Life of 18 Sextillion Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Deep inside a mountain in central Italy, scientists are laying a trap for dark matter<\/a>. The bait? A big metal tank full of 3.5 tons (3,200 kilograms) of pure liquid xenon<\/a>. This noble gas is one of the cleanest, most radiation-proof substances on Earth, making it an ideal target for capturing some of the rarest particle interactions in the universe.<\/p>\n

It all sounds vaguely sinister; said Christian Wittweg, a doctoral candidate at the University of M\u00fcnster in Germany, who has worked with the so-called X<\/a>enon<\/a> collaboration<\/a> for half a decade, going to work every day feels like \u201cpaying a Bond villain a visit.\u201d So far, the mountain-dwelling researchers haven\u2019t captured any dark matter. But they recently succeeded in detecting one of the rarest particle interactions in the universe. [11 Biggest Unanswered Questions About Dark Matter<\/a>]<\/p>\n

According to a new study published today (April 24) in the journal Nature<\/a>, the team of more than 100 researchers measured, for the first time ever, the decay of a xenon-124 atom into a tellurium 124 atom<\/a> through an extremely rare process called two-neutrino double electron capture. This type of radioactive decay occurs when an atom\u2019s nucleus absorbs two electrons from its outer electron shell simultaneously, thereby releasing a double dose of the ghostly particles called neutrinos<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Read more<\/div>\n

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Deep inside a mountain in central Italy, scientists are laying a trap for dark matter. The bait? A big metal tank full of 3.5 tons (3,200 kilograms) of pure liquid xenon. This noble gas is one of the cleanest, most radiation-proof substances on Earth, making it an ideal target for capturing some of the rarest [\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-89956","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\/89956","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=89956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}