It’s the heaviest oxygen isotope you’ve ever seen, and it’s behaving in a strange way: that’s oxygen-28, one of two new isotopes of the organic element to have recently been created in a lab.
Yosuke Kondo of Tokyo Institute of Technology writes in an article published in Nature on Wednesday that her crew of scientists subjected some elements to “extreme conditions” to cause the formation of oxygen-28 and another isotope, oxygen-27, which is slightly smaller.
To force the new isotopes of oxygen to form, Kondo’s team used the RIKEN Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory in the Japanese city of Saitama. Officials fired a beam of calcium-48 isotopes at a beryllium target to break off pieces of the calcium - which has 20 protons in its nucleus - and produce lighter atoms. Among those produced were atoms of fluorine-29, which has 9 protons and 20 neutrons and sits next to oxygen on the Periodic Table.
Researchers then took this fluorine-29 atom and smashed it together with a liquid hydrogen atom - which has 1 proton in its nucleus - to trim the fluorine down into oxygen. It worked, and they produced two different atoms using the procedure, one with 20 neutrons and one with 19 - oxygen-28 and oxygen-27, respectively.
Stability was expected due to mathematical relationships governing “shells” of particles in the nucleus, in which multiples of eight and 20 are considered “magic” numbers due to their typically high stability. Kondo’s team expected oxygen-28 to be stable because its isotope number is “doubly magic.”
For example: the form of oxygen we breathe here on Earth is oxygen-16, which is a multiple of eight and is extremely stable - so don’t worry, your breath isn’t about to be spontaneously taken away!