Re:115, the Newest Element on the Periodic Table
by mtdewcmu on Saturday August 31, 2013 @05:54AM
(#6306364)
Some of them seem to last much longer than that, or are hypothesized to. If an element has a half-life of a million years, then it probably exists in large quantities throughout the universe. The solar system is a relatively closed system, though, so the elements we see around us have generally been in the solar system for its entire lifetime. So an element would have to last 5+ billion years to exist on earth.
They are unlikely to exist elsewhere except for a few moments (not even a second) after a supernova. A regular star will not make them, and they decay extremely fast.