An international research team at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University has successfully created five new isotopes, bringing the stars closer to Earth.
The isotopes — known as thulium-182, thulium-183, ytterbium-186, ytterbium-187, and lutetium-190 — were reported Feb. 15 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
These represent the first batch of new isotopes made at FRIB, a user facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, or DOE-SC, supporting the mission of the DOE-SC Office of Nuclear Physics. The new isotopes show that FRIB is nearing the creation of nuclear specimens that currently only exist when ultradense celestial bodies known as neutron stars crash into each other.
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