Eli5
When new elements get discovered theoretically they tend to be towards the end of the periodic table, why can there not be an element that has 1000 protons, neutrons and electrons ? Or other multiples of each ?
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The issue is that most elements past plutonium start decay extremely quickly, where once they are produced, some last seconds-milliseconds on the long end of the scale, such as livermorium (element 116) most stable isotope lasting 53 milliseconds and 118 lasting less than a millisecond before decaying
The more pieces there are, the more mass it has, and the more energy it takes to hold the atom together. That’s why hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and the stuff at the other end is more exotic. There are limits where the amount of energy it would take to hold the atom together just won’t happen naturally.
Because protons are positively charged. Meaning they repel each other. Kind of like two magnets with the same end pointed towards each other.
The only reason atoms stay together is because the nuclear forces are strong enough to hold the protons together. But as the atoms get bigger and bigger and bigger, the nuclear forces start to not be enough and instead the repulsive force of the protons becomes enough to split protons off the nucleus. This is called radioactive decay.
And so far as we can tell, the bigger the nucleus the worse this gets, with atoms decaying rapidly. Hell all of those atoms at the end of the periodic table that have been added in recent years aren’t naturally occurring as far as we can tell, they’ve only been created in labs. And when they are created they only stick around for a fraction of a second before decaying into smaller nuclei.
So yes, hypothetically you could just keep adding protons, but the more you do the harder it is to hold it all together, or even get them together in the first place.
Maybe one day we will discover a super heavy element that is weirdly stable, but that’s not how things seem to be going.
Protons are all positively charged and thus repel each other. That’s why neutrons, which are the same size but don’t have any charge are between these protons inside the atom’s nucleus, like kind of a wall between these repelling forces. But if you start packing too many protons into this nucleus, you’ll reach a point when this repelling force becomes too great and the nucleus become unstable and break appart. That is why you can’t have an infinite variety of elements. I simplified this the best I could. This is roughly the way I explain this to my high school students.
We sort atoms by the number of protons they have, and call each possible number of protons an element. (If you change the number of neutrons, you get a different isotope, and changing the number of electrons gives you an ion, but protons define the element.)
Protons all share positive electrical charge, and are held into the nucleus by the “strong force” provided by the neutrons. Usually, you find atoms with *about* one neutron per proton, but there’s plenty of variation.
As atoms get bigger, that size becomes a problem. The strong force really only works at incredibly close range, and past a certain point, it doesn’t seem like there’s enough room to cram in enough holding-together power from neutrons alongside all the protons that make for a heavier element.
There’s some speculation that there might exist an “island of stability” where very specific configurations of those components are significantly less likely to fall apart (i.e. radioactive) than similar atoms, but the search has so far turned up nothing, partly because it’s really hard to find a way to smash enough parts into place all at once.
Because the strong force isn’t strong enough to bind the atom when it gets large enough, and the weak force wins, yeeting particles away.
Those aren’t adjectives by the way, the weak and strong forces are two of the four fundamental forces of nature. The other two being electromagnetism and gravity.
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