Why is the Oxygen 28 Experiment Important?
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Oxygen 28 is an extremely heavy isotope of Oxygen with 20 neutrons and 8 protons in its nucleus.
By comparison the most common isotope if Oxygen is Oxygen 16 with 8 protons, and 8 neutrons.
Attempts to create and study Oxygen 28 are important because it helps us better understand how larger stable isotopes work.
Oxygen 28 was believed to be a *magic number* meaning that our predictions said that it should be stable despite being so heavy, but so far the experiments have shown that this isn’t the case.
If that is the case it means that we need to change our understanding of how heavier elements work.
An atom’s element is defined by the number of protons. However, you can vary the number of neutrons to get different isotopes. Some isotopes stick together more or less forever, while others are radioactive and fall apart on shorter time scales.
We believed that we had found good rules of thumb for guessing which isotopes would be stable, based on “magic numbers” that seemed to be present in many isotopes that we knew were stable (and yes, there is a deeper theory there, but they’re known as magic numbers for ease of conversation). Based on that experience, there was an expectation that ^28 O would be stable. However, the recent experiment found that is actually falls apart rather quickly. Therefore, we know that our magic numbers idea doesn’t always hold true, and we need to go searching for a new theory to explain the patterns of stability that we see in reality.
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