Talk:Astatine

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Density of orthorhombic astatine (speculation)

When solid, Cl, Br and I have orthorhombic crystalline structures. The volumes of the respective unit cells are 230.91, 262.1046 and 341.5684 cubic Å. The crystalline atomic radii are 0.99, 1.135 and 1.345 Å. If astatine instead has an (unmetallic) orthorhombic structure, its unit cell volume can be indicatively extrapolated using the cube of its predicted covalent atomic radius of 1.5 Å. Its crystalline atomic radius may be marginally larger due to intralayer bonding, as appears to occur in iodine, but I’ll ignore this possibility as I have no way of quantifying it. A straight line extrapolation (R-squared = 0.9989) of unit cell volume for Cl, Br, and I vs. the cube of atomic radius for Cl, Br, I and At indicates an atomic volume for At of 412.3276. There are eight atoms in an orthorhombic unit cell so that gives a density (from the above calcs for metallic astatine) of 278.96 x 10^(–23) grams/412.3276 cubic Å = 6.76 grams per cubic centimetre, noting it is likely to be less than this given stronger intralayer bonding. For comparison, the figure cited in the article is 6.35 ±0.15. Sandbh (talk) 03:16, 17 April 2015‎ (UTC)[reply]

"Astitene" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Astitene. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 April 21#Astitene until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 17:50, 21 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Bombarding?

Is "bombarding" really a scientific term that can be used at the end of the article, right at the end of the lead, before the subsections? FikaMedHasse (talk) 10:53, 11 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It's the standard term in this context, yes. DMacks (talk) 11:29, 11 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, thank you. I just found the phrase a bit comical. FikaMedHasse (talk) 11:37, 12 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Sometimes science adopts lay-language words and uses interesting shades of meaning or things that sound funny. In this case, an early ref is Enrico Fermi's "Artificial Radioactivity produced by Neutron Bombardment" article from 1934 (doi:10.1098/rspa.1934.0168). List of unusual units of measurement is a good read. DMacks (talk) 16:34, 12 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

More recent papers on At chemistry

One, two, three, four, five. Double sharp (talk) 22:01, 12 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

8 hour half-life vs immediately vaporized

@R8R, Sandbh, and Double sharp: To a layman, these two statements appear to conflict. We say a sample has never been assembled, with vaporization as an explanation, but then we would still have a gaseous sample. Or if by vaporization we mean more than just turn into a gas, then do we mean accelerate the half-life decay?

Onceinawhile (talk) 10:18, 16 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Onceinawhile: Once the sample is vaporised, it's been disassembled. Double sharp (talk) 10:20, 16 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

How is that different to being a gas? A sample of Helium is disassembled too. Onceinawhile (talk) 10:23, 16 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Onceinawhile: Okay, fair enough. The way I'd think of it in the hypothetical situation (which is probably more or less what the article was going for), you'd have an astatine sample somewhere, and it would vaporise and diffuse through the air (thus disassembling itself) and cause a massive contamination problem. But I suppose we could think about it being done in a vacuum. So, to avoid doubts about the wording, I've changed it to Consequently, a solid sample of the element has never been seen, because any macroscopic specimen would be immediately vaporized by the heat of its radioactivity. Double sharp (talk) 10:28, 16 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict) I don't see the conflict. Research is limited because samples are not stable due to its short half-life and radioactive heating. With cooling techniques it might be possible to synthesise in weighable quantities but this is technically challenging. Sure you will obtain a gas, but then there are technical challenges of containing it safely and it will decay rapidly. Polyamorph (talk) 10:28, 16 September 2023 (UTC)[reply]