COULD a superheavy element, more massive than any created in the lab, really have gone unnoticed in Earth’s rocks until now? That was the claim of a team of physicists last week, but the announcement has prompted only scepticism.
Amnon Marinov at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel led a team that ran a purified solution of naturally occurring thorium through a mass spectrometer to measure the mass of individual atoms. Thorium has an atomic mass close to 232, but the team saw a handful of atoms with a much greater mass, at just over 292.
The heaviest atom…
