Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and the Yahoo Answers website is now in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.

? asked in Science & MathematicsPhysics · 10 years ago

how long will an atom exist until it loses its energy?

How long will an atom exist until it loses its energy? it seems like these atoms (stable ones) like hydrogen has been around for billions/trillions of years without losing energy. Are they actually losing energy or is there another undefined factor that they continue to exist?

5 Answers

Relevance
  • 10 years ago
    Favorite Answer

    Hydrogen and most other atoms are stable. There are some ideas that they might decay in something more than 10^34 years. That's a billion billion billion million years. But so far, nobody has seen one decay.

  • 10 years ago

    Things don't just lose energy. Energy is sapped from them. That is, something causes them to lose energy. As one person commented, why would atoms lose energy? There is nothing to sap them of their energy if they are stable atoms.

    Of course it's a whole new ball game for unstable atoms... like radioactive ones. As they decay, they slough off photons and/or particles. In which case, those are energy losses. Eventually radioactive atoms morph into stable, non radioactive atoms. For example, radioactive U235 will eventually become stable lead (Pb) at the bottom of the decay chain.

    You are right about hydrogen. It was one of the first, if not the first, element created after the big bang. Hydrogen, helium, and perhaps lithium were the first elements in our new universe. And those elements have been around for just about 13.7 billions years in one form or another.

  • TroupM
    Lv 4
    10 years ago

    Stable elemental isotopes of Hydrogen such as 1H (elemental) and 2H (Deuterium) will, for all practical purposes, last forever unless subjected to high energy radiation or neutron bombardment.

    That said, spontaneous Neutron (beta) decay and Proton decay are predicted by the standard model- these subatomic particles are expected to decay on the orders of 10^9 and 10^32 years, respectively. This is one billion years for a Neutron; the decay time of a Proton is 15 orders of magnitude greater than the age of the universe.

  • Anonymous
    4 years ago

    enable' see... The magnetic field alterations at a variable fee, finding on the spin of the earth and desperate, no longer basically via celestial bodies, yet via the peak of mountains and distribution of weight on the exterior. additionally, the earth isn't a suited sphere, yet a spheroid. the international conveyor strikes extra earth than your occasion is accounting for. Plus the sea floor is being lifted simply by fact the continents flow. additionally, some places erode swifter than others. Sand strikes very lots extra beneficial than rock, so a blanket conventional ought to no longer help. additionally, your occasion seems to ignore approximately what's under the earth and the place the salt comes from in the 1st place. it incredibly is unlike x quantity of salt grow to be dropped, and it would probably be get much less and much less as time is going on. there is so lots extra to it than that. the shortcoming of cracks in strata can happen in many, many distinctive strategies. you could desire to perceive particular strata and go from there. of direction, there is voluminous information opposite on your point of view with reference to strata and geology. Your understanding of carbon relationship is so disgusting it makes me bodily sick to study it. "The 2004 version of the calibration curve extends back fairly properly to 26,000 years BP. Any blunders in the calibration curve do no longer make a contribution extra beneficial than ±sixteen years to the dimensions blunders for the period of the historic and previous due prehistoric sessions (0 - 6,000 yrs BP) and below ±163 years over the entire 26,000 years of the curve. In previous due 2009, the magazine Radiocarbon introduced settlement on the INTCAL09 conventional, which extends a extra precise calibration curve to 50,000 years." of direction, carbon relationship isn't used to determine the age of the earth. The age of the earth is desperate via very lots of autonomous jointly helping information. All you have is a nasty line of reasoning and incorrect records.

  • 10 years ago

    Why would it lose its energy?

    They continue to exist because there's no reason to lose its energy.

Still have questions? Get your answers by asking now.