For the first time, scientists have created oxygen-28, a rare oxygen isotope that has 12 more neutrons than oxygen-16, the most common form of oxygen on the planet. This newly created “heavy” oxygen isotope has the highest number of neutrons ever seen in an oxygen atom and was expected to be ultrastable and last virtually forever.

Instead, however, it degraded incredibly quickly — a finding that challenges our understanding of the strong force, which binds the fundamental particles of matter, such as protons and neutrons, to form larger particles in an atom’s nucleus.

“It opens a very, very big fundamental question about nature’s strongest interaction, the nuclear strong force,” Rituparna Kanungo, a physicist at Saint Mary’s University in Canada who was not involved with the experiment, told New Scientist.

source livescience.com