Astatine

Astatine is a very rare radioactive chemical element with the chemical symbol At and atomic number 85. It occurs on Earth as the decay product of various heavier elements. All its isotopes are short-lived; the most stable is astatine-210, with a half-life of 8.1 hours. Elemental astatine has never been viewed because any macroscopic sample would be immediately vaporized by its radioactive heating. It has yet to be determined if this obstacle could be overcome with sufficient cooling.

The bulk properties of astatine are not known with any certainty. Many of these have been estimated based on its periodic table position as a heavier analog of iodine, and a member of the halogens – the group of elements including fluorine, chlorine and bromine. It is likely to have a dark or lustrous appearance and may be a semiconductor or possibly a metal; it probably has a higher melting point than that of iodine. Chemically, several anionic species of astatine are known and most of its compounds resemble those of iodine. It also shows some metallic behavior, including being able to form a stable monatomic cation in aqueous solution (unlike the lighter halogens).

Isotopes of astatine

Astatine (At) has 37 known isotopes, all of which are radioactive; the range of their mass numbers is from 191 to 229. There also exist 23 metastable excited states. The longest-lived isotope is ²¹⁰At, which has a half-life of 8.1 hours; the longest-lived isotope existing in naturally occurring decay chains is ²¹⁹At with a half-life of 56 seconds.

There are 32 known isotopes of astatine, with atomic masses (mass numbers) of 191 and 193–223. No stable or even long-lived astatine isotope is known, and no such isotope is expected to exist.

Astatine has 23 nuclear isomers (nuclei with one or more nucleons – protons or neutrons – in an excited state). A nuclear isomer may also be called a "meta-state"; this means the system has more internal energy than the "ground state" (the state with the lowest possible internal energy), making the former likely to decay into the latter. There may be more than one isomer for each isotope. The most stable of them is astatine-202m1, which has a half-life of about 3 minutes; this is longer than those of all ground states except those of isotopes 203–211 and 220. The least stable one is astatine-214m1; its half-life of 265 ns is shorter than those of all ground states except that of astatine-213.