Scientists discover new form of oxygen. All you need to know

The newly discovered Oxygen-28 has 12 extra neutrons packed into its nucleus, the highest number of neutrons ever seen in the nucleus of an oxygen atom

In a significant discovery, Oxygen-28, a new isotope of oxygen, was discovered by a team of physicists led by nuclear physicist Yosuke Kondo of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan.

The newly discovered Oxygen-28 has 12 extra neutrons packed into its nucleus, the highest number of neutrons ever seen in the nucleus of an oxygen atom.

Earlier, scientists believed that this isotope was unusually stable.

The team of researchers says that the nucleus of an atom contains subatomic particles called nucleons, consisting of protons and neutrons.

According to a report by Science Alert, the atomic number of an element is defined by the number of protons it has, but the number of neutrons can vary. Elements of different neutron numbers are known as isotopes; oxygen has 8 protons but can have differing numbers of neutrons.

The Oxygen-28 nucleus is one of a relatively small number of so-called “doubly magic” nuclei in the standard shell-model picture of nuclear structure, according to the research team in Japan. This is because the proton number Z = 8 and the neutron number N = 20 are both “magic numbers,” which are of particular interest in nuclear physics.

A Durham University paper stated that 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.

This discovery was performed at a world-class nuclear physics beam factory located in Japan, where the scientists first bombarded a beryllium target with a beam of calcium-48 isotopes to create lighter atoms, such as 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.

The majority of oxygen on Earth, including the air we breathe, is a doubly magic form of oxygen, oxygen-16.

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