beryllium-8
Sign in to saveAlso known as Be-8, 8Be
Beryllium-8 (8Be, Be-8) is a radionuclide with 4 neutrons and 4 protons. It is an unbound resonance of two alpha particles and nominally an isotope of beryllium. This has important ramifications in stellar nucleosynthesis as it creates a bottleneck in the creation of heavier chemical elements.
Key facts
- Isotope.image
- Beryllium-8.svg
- Isotope.mass_number
- 8
- Isotope.symbol
- Be
- Isotope.num_neutrons
- 4
- Isotope.num_protons
- 4
- Isotope.abundance
- 0
- Isotope.decay_mass
- 4
- Isotope.decay_symbol
- He
- Isotope.mass
- 8.00530510(4)
- Isotope.spin
- 0
- Isotope.decay_mode1
- α
- Isotope.decay_energy1
- 0.09184(4)
via Wikipedia infobox
~6 min read
Encyclopedic overview
6 sectionsContents
- Discovery
- Properties
- Role in stellar nucleosynthesis
- Hypothetical universes with stable <sup>8</sup>Be
- Notes
- References
Beryllium-8 (8Be, Be-8) is a radionuclide with 4 neutrons and 4 protons. It is an unbound resonance of two alpha particles and nominally an isotope of beryllium. This has important ramifications in stellar nucleosynthesis as it creates a bottleneck in the creation of heavier chemical elements.
== Discovery == The discovery of beryllium-8 occurred shortly after the construction of the first particle accelerator in 1932. Physicists John Douglas Cockcroft and Ernest Walton performed their first experiment with their accelerator at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, in which they irradiated lithium-7 with protons. They reported that this populated a nucleus with A = 8 that near-instantaneously decays into two alpha particles. This activity was observed again several months later, and was inferred to originate from 8Be.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “beryllium-8” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.