PHYSICS
A ‘doubly magic’ form of oxygen may challenge the laws of physics
WORDS KILEY PRICE
For the first time, scientists have created oxygen-28, a rare oxygen isotope that has 12 more neutrons than oxygen-16, the most common form of oxygen on the planet. This new ‘heavy’ isotope has the highest number of neutrons ever seen in an oxygen atom and was expected to be ultrastable. Instead it degraded quickly, a finding that challenges our understanding of the strong force, which binds the fundamental particles of matter, such as protons and neutrons, to form larger particles in an atom’s nucleus. “It opens a very big fundamental question about nature’s strongest interaction, the nuclear strong force,” said Rituparna Kanungo, a physicist at Saint Mary’s University in Canada.