Magnesium-18 Degrades Before It Forms

As we've seen, astatine has a very short half life, but researchers have produced a magnesium isotope that is so unstable that they can hardly detect it. Three stable isotopes and 19 unstable ones make up magnesium in its natural state.

Magnesium-18 and magnesium-19 are two of the unstable ones that are particularly intriguing due to their relatively brief lifetimes. The half-life of magnesium-19 is 5 picoseconds. Five trillionths of a second is that. Prepare for magnesium-18 if that sounds like a short period of time, which it is.

Because magnesium-18 only lasts for roughly a sextillionth of a second, it has not been measured sufficiently. It disintegrates so swiftly that it isn't even able to organize electrons around itself to form an actual atom. It just consists of a nucleus before disintegrating. Therefore, scientists can only watch what it did throughout its brief existence rather than studying it directly.