According to a new study done by Italian researchers, electrons are essentially immortal, being unable to decay. Of course, nothing is ever truly immortal, but electrons have a life of 6.6 Yottayears or 6.6 * 10^28 years. That's 66 with 27 zeros after it. These are the electrons that make up all material and matter within the universe, including ourselves.
Electrons never decay because of a fundamental rule in physics. If particles decay, they must decay from a heavier element, to a lighter element, with equal charges. Because the electron is the lightest particle with negative charge, it is unable to decay because the next lightest particle is called a neutrino with 0 charge. This law is the conservation of charge where both mass is conserved in the form of energy, and charge is conserved from one particle to another.
Reference: Carpineti, A. (2015, December 17). Electrons Are Practically Immortal. Retrieved March 6, 2016, from http://www.iflscience.com/physics/electrons-are-practically-immortal
Image: http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/066/072/iFF/atom-electrons.jpg?1400071477
By Micalah B
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed this post. In my chemistry class, we have talked a lot about atom, and the sub atomic particles like electrons that make them up, however we don't go into the more in depth details like this. Thanks for the interesting and informative post!
Thanks for the reply Micalah! I'm glad you liked it!
DeleteI really enjoyed this post. It brought back memories of when I learned about atoms in high school. It was a refreshing blog post and on top of that learned something new about atoms! Nice job!
ReplyDeleteThanks Trey!
Delete