Eli5. Why is there a limited amount of elements why aren’t there like infinite?

Question

Like what’s stops them at 118?

In: 0

Answer 1

Nothiong stops it.

Nature stopped at Uranium, 92 protons. That’s the heaviest thing a super nova can make.

We made everything after Uranium in labs. We’ve made up to 118 protons. It it so radioactive, it exists for like millionths (0.0000001) of a second before it decays and falls apart.

Is it predicted there is a number of protons in the mid 100s that will hit something called an island of stability where these super heavy elements may exist and be stable, but its just theorized currently.

What is keeping us at 118 right now? We need stupid levels of energy to go past. To do that we need a bigger and larger Large Hadron Collider that can push even more energy into the particle collisions.