In a spectacular discovery, 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 ...

This initial deformation favours nuclei which are pear-shaped in their ground state. This is the case of the Xenon due to some internal structure effects associated with a number of proton Z=54.

A new study, which sampled xenon from carbon dioxide-rich mineral spring gas from the volcanic Eifel province in Germany, points to an asteroidal origin for part of the volatile elements trapped ...