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Home Q & A Board Science-Related Homework Help Chemistry (Moderator: Laser_3)
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bugnsprout bugnsprout
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11 years ago
Why isn't technetium produced in stars? Technetium #43 on the periodic table is a man made element. However, it is my understanding that stars produce all elements found in nature by fusion (i.e hydrogen into hellium, hellium into lithium, etc, etc..)

But when a star gets to Molybdenum #42, I would assume that the next element would be Technetium #43, why does it skip it to produce Ruthenium #44 ? I hope I'm making sense with my question, thank you.
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Staff Member
10 months ago
The reason it doesn't occur is because all of its isotopes are radioactive, with the longest-lived ones having a half-life of just a few million years. Even if the Earth was created with significant amounts of it, the odds are minuscule that there's even one atom of it left by now, after more than four billion years have passed.
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