this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 30 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

Iron has the most stable nuclei because of... chemistry reasons... so it was thought most radioactive decay chains would effectively end there. This is also neat on an astrophysics level because iron is the last element created by first generation stars, so you'd get this grand entropic cycle that ends with a universe made of black holes, neutron stars, iron, and loose hydrogen atoms, more or less. In theory but not practice, probably.

For all human practical purposes decay chains end in lead though. The time scale in the meme is the difference between "effectively stable" lead and "as stable as possible" iron.

Tl;Dr everything below iron will get fused into at least iron by stars. Everything above will decay into iron.

[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz -1 points 2 days ago (3 children)

nuclei because of… chemistry reasons…

Chemistry isn’t the study of nuclei.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 16 points 2 days ago (2 children)
[–] bleistift2@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Did you read that article? Nuclear chemistry deals with how radioactivy changes chemical properties. It is not the study of which isotopes are stable, and why. That’s still physics.

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Are you illiterate, fam? Don't have ChatGPT summarize articles for you, it's stop your brain thinky good