New form of oxygen found by scientists (Representational Image: Pexels)
A team of physicists led by nuclear physicist Yosuke Kondo of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan has discovered Oxygen-28, a new isotope of Oxygen.
Oxygen-28 has the highest number of neutrons ever seen in the nucleus of an oxygen atom. According to scientists, Oxygen-28 is also the heaviest version of Oxygen ever created. The discovery of Oxygen-28 represents an extremely exciting advance and a core focus for future nuclear experiments and theoretical investigations. Oxygen-28 is extremely rare thanks to its exceptionally high neutron-to-proton ratio.
The full research paper has been published in Nature Journal.
The team of researchers says that the nucleus of an atom contains subatomic particles called nucleons, consisting of protons and neutrons.
The atomic number of an element is defined by the number of protons it has, but the number of neutrons can vary, Science Alert reported. Elements of different neutron numbers are known as isotopes; oxygen has 8 protons but can have differing numbers of neutrons.
Earlier, the scientists had observed the largest number of neutrons to be 18, in the isotype oxygen-26 (8 protons plus 18 neutrons equals 26 nucleons).
The team of researchers in Japan says that The Oxygen-28 nucleus is of particular interest in nuclear physics, as with the proton number Z = 8 and neutron number N = 20 being both 'magic numbers', it is expected to be one of a relatively small number of so-called 'doubly magic' nuclei in the standard shell-model picture of nuclear structure.
The comparison between previously intractable theoretical predictions with 28O represents a major test of our fundamental understanding of the nuclear world and showed that Oxygen-28 helps constrain many features of the underlying theory, a Durham University report said.
This discovery has been performed at a world-leading nuclear physics beam factory in Japan.
First, the team fired a beam of calcium-48 isotopes at a beryllium target to produce lighter atoms, including fluorine-29, an isotope of fluorine with 9 protons and 20 neutrons.
This fluorine-29 was then separated out and collided with a liquid hydrogen target to knock off a proton in an attempt to create oxygen-28.
Most of the oxygen on Earth, including the air we breathe, is a doubly magic form of oxygen, oxygen-16.