Dark Matter Search Discovers A Spectacular Bonus: The Longest-Lived Unstable Element Ever

The XENON collaboration has just publicly announced the discovery that xenon-124, an isotope of the element Xenon, is fundamentally unstable. Its half-life is a whopping 1.8 × 10²² years: more than one trillion times the present age of the Universe.

More details on the discovery can be found here, and the Nature paper can be found here.

April 30, 2019