#Rf September 26

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For the month of September 2024 several of us are going to take on the 30-Day Periodic Elements Coach4aday Challenge. The concept is to show the symbol of one of the 118 elements and give a few facts about it. Today I have chosen Rf.

Rf is the symbol for Rutherfordium.

30-Day Elements Challenge Guidelines

Like previous challenges there are no hard and fast rules to participate. There are a few suggested guidelines.

1. Each day in September 2024 show the symbol for one particular element.
2. Share at least one fact about that element
3. If so inclined use the hash tag #Coach4adayChallenge on social media platforms

September 26th-Rutherfordium

Here are three facts about Rutherfordium.

Synthetic Element: Rutherfordium is a man-made element and does not occur naturally. It was first synthesized in 1964 by a team of Russian scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and later confirmed by American researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It is created by bombarding lighter elements, such as plutonium or californium, with accelerated ions.

Highly Unstable: Rutherfordium is highly radioactive and unstable. Its most stable isotope, Rutherfordium-267, has a half-life of about 1.3 hours, meaning it decays rapidly into lighter elements. Because of this, rutherfordium has no practical applications outside of scientific research.

Named After Ernest Rutherford: The element is named in honor of Ernest Rutherford, a pioneering physicist known as the father of nuclear physics. He was the first to successfully split the atom and developed the Rutherford model of the atom, which laid the foundation for modern atomic theory.