How many neutrons can an atom hold?
Nature news: Atoms can be more overweight than we thought, a team of scientists in the United States has discovered.
They have sent atoms crashing into one another in a particle accelerator to create bloated versions of the elements aluminium and magnesium. The new, artificial forms of these metals have many more neutrons in their atomic nuclei than do the everyday versions1
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Believe it or not but the classical vacuum is indeed awash with every single wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum. The atom, even in its ground state, is thus in constant momentum exchange with the vacuum field. These exchanges at each and every level of the atom, alone, sustain the atom. Yes, it’s not so weird as modern quantum mechanics.
The number of neutrons (or nucleons) an atom can hold thus depends critically on its ambient field. What we observe in the crashing processes here are simply transient (unstable) heavy nuclei, that is, in fleeting high-pressure ambient fields.
The neutron star is in fact a heavy atomic nucleus due simply to its high pressure ambient that contains it. The ultimate nuclei in our universe are what I have called the Cosmic Cores. See the short introductory item www.sittampalam.net/LateralThoughts.pdf for a glimpse of this ultimate concept on the nature of things. Thank you.
Posted by: Eugene Sittampalam | November 16, 2007 2:37 PM