What Is the Universe's Heaviest Element?

As is customary, there are a few solid answers to the preceding issue, but there are also many subtleties. The question is not as well defined as it appears.

Weight and mass are two distinct scientific ideas, as we have already discussed. They are connected, of course, but weight is a force that is affected by the gravitational field of the location where it is being measured, whereas mass is an intrinsic attribute of matter. Therefore, for heaviness, we have two options: we can use the mass definition or we may discuss how an element makes us feel.

"Are atoms massless? I had no idea they were Catholic”

Uranium is frequently found to be the heaviest element. The most prevalent and stable of all naturally occurring isotopes, uranium-238, is sometimes regarded as the heaviest substance to be discovered in the natural world. As the name suggests, it has an atomic mass of 238 due to the presence of both neutrons and protons in its nucleus. It consists of 92 protons and 146 neutrons for uranium-238.

However, it turns out that plutonium (94 protons), although having come to our awareness in the lab of Glenn T. Seaborg and his colleagues at UC Berkeley, also exists naturally. Every element with a greater number of protons was found after being manufactured in the lab. This natural plutonium has several uranium-related properties. Some have been discovered in the seafloor-deposited meteorite dust. So far as we are aware, plutonium-244 is the heaviest naturally occurring element.

However, we have synthesized far more powerful elements than plutonium. Ooganesson (chemical symbol Og) is the heaviest element ever synthesized. It has an atomic mass of 294 due to its 118 protons and 176 neutrons. It was found in 2002 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, near Moscow, and named after the Russian-Armenian nuclear scientist Yuri Oganessian, who discovered some of the periodic table's heaviest elements.

It is possible that this record will be broken at some point. Nuclear physicists have discovered evidence of so-called magic numbers, which are precise quantities of protons and/or neutrons that are significantly more stable than other nuclei. These are the numbers 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. The latter has only been seen for neutrons, although it is plausible that a hypothetical unbihexium with 126 protons and many more neutrons may be synthesized and remains stable. Or, at the very least, steady enough for us to measure.

Which weighs more, a kilogram of lead or a kilogram of feathers?

Now, instead of focusing on the atoms' mass, we are considering another property instead: density. The mass per unit of volume is known as density. It is a very helpful number that, when applied to the human experience, makes the infamous subheading trick question work. We assume that a kilogram of lead should be heavier than a kilogram of feathers despite their having the same mass since lead is denser than feathers.

Additionally, density does not scale with atomic mass, therefore even if uranium has the highest mass, it would not necessarily be the densest element if you had a cube of it and a cube of another element. Osmium is the densest element, while iridium is just behind it. Both are barely distinguishable from one another and almost twice as dense as lead.

The components must perform a strange balancing act in order to be so thick. Due to their high atomic mass and relatively tiny atomic radius, which are both caused by their well-organized electrons, osmium atoms can fit more densely into a given volume than any other known element. The density of osmium is 22.6 times that of liquid water.