The plutonium-244 hints at how heavy metals form in stars. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. A rare version of the radioactive ...

Plutonium may be the most feared and fearsome substance in the entire periodic table. It's best known as the main ingredient of atomic bombs like the infamous Fat Man, dropped on Nagasaki on 9 August ...

Elements that do not exist in nature—that have been created in a laboratory—are unstable. After hours or days of one element bombarding another with enough energy for both to fuse, the resulting new ...

Plutonium has since been key to a number of more successful missions. The Voyager space probes contain batteries that still provide an estimated 300 watts of power today, down from 500 watts when they ...

On this day in 1940, the element plutonium was first isolated by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Here’s a quiz on it.

Plutonium, a radioactive element, is produced when uranium, another radioactive element, absorbs neutrons, and most of it is artificially produced, except for a small amount found in uranium ore.

A team of scientists has discovered a new, stable form of plutonium – and done so by accident. The famously unstable element is tricky to transport, store and dispose of, but the find could lead to ...

The vast majority of the radioactive plutonium on the planet is man-made—roughly 500 metric tons, or enough to make 100,000 nuclear weapons. Much of it is the legacy of the nuclear arms race between ...

The rare form of the element found on the Pacific seabed points to its violent birth in colliding stars. By William J. Broad Scientists studying a sample of oceanic crust retrieved from the Pacific ...