mathiaseI’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Boron Zone. It has a range of scientists studying all different topics. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
There are a number of isotopes for all elements. Only a few are stable – so in that sense, there is a specific number. The ones that are unstable are radioactive – they eventually decay, and keep doing so until they hit an isotope that is stable.
The table here shows isotopes that are stable and unstable in a 2D graph:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_nuclides
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You couldn’t have a stable isotope of oxygen with only one neutron; I think there are only two stable isotopes of oxygen: one with 8 neutrons and one with 10.
Helium has two stable isotopes: one with one neutron, which is relatively rare, and one with two neutrons, which is the most common on Earth and in our Sun. There are some stars in the universe that have more of the former though, and we don’t really understand why!
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Kind of related but one of my students has just started looking at stable isotopes of C & N to map out food webs in seagrass pastures – kind of a who eats who. Some researchers have also used stable isotopes of O to look at long distance cross latitude migration of animals
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Cool question – good answers!
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