{"id":49444,"date":"2025-06-06T14:25:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T08:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=49444"},"modified":"2025-06-06T15:38:29","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T10:08:29","slug":"astatine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/astatine\/","title":{"rendered":"Astatine"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Astatine Latest News<\/h2>\n<p>Recently, an international collaboration led by researchers at the University of Jyv\u00e4skyl\u00e4, Finland, detected and measured the half-life of the heaviest proton emitter 188At (astatine) isotope.<\/p>\n<h2>About Astatine<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>It is a\u00a0<strong>rare and highly radioactive element<\/strong>\u00a0with atomic number 85.<\/li>\n<li>It is part of the halogen group (Group 17) in the periodic table, which also includes fluorine, chlorine, bromine, and iodine. Unlike the other halogens, astatine has\u00a0<strong>no stable isotopes.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Features of Astatine<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>It\u2019s probably a\u00a0<strong>dark-colored solid<\/strong>\u00a0at\u00a0<strong>room temperature<\/strong>\u00a0and pressure, but there is too little of it to know for sure. Due to its extreme radioactivity, it has a blue glow from ionizing air. All of its isotopes are radioactive.<\/li>\n<li>It occurs naturally as a decay product, but\u00a0<strong>has a short half-life.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>It has\u00a0<strong>41 known isotopes<\/strong>\u00a0ranging from mass number\u00a0<strong>188 and 190-229,<\/strong>\u00a0all of which are radioactive.<\/li>\n<li>When the 188-astatine emits the proton, it becomes\u00a0<strong>187-polonium isotope<\/strong>, which has a half-life of only 1.4 milliseconds. The 187-polonium isotope then decays via alpha decay into 183-lead and so on, until it reaches a stable nucleus.<\/li>\n<li>It likely forms compounds similar to iodine but exhibits more metallic characteristics.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Astatine\u2019s\u00a0<strong>chemical properties most<\/strong>\u00a0closely resemble those\u00a0<strong>of iodine.<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Astatine FAQs<\/h2>\n<p><strong>Q1:<\/strong>\u00a0What is astatine used for?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ans:<\/strong>\u00a0It is mainly used for research. It is also used as a radioactive tracer and a treatment for thyroid cancer.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Q2:<\/strong>\u00a0What is special about astatine?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Ans:<\/strong>\u00a0Astatine is an extremely radioactive element.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source:\u00a0<\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/sci-tech\/science\/heaviest-proton-emitter-astatine-188-detected\/article69661352.ece\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">TH<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Astatine is a rare, highly radioactive halogen element with atomic number 85, found in trace amounts in nature and used mainly in research and medicine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":49422,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[720,21,22,23],"class_list":{"0":"post-49444","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"tag-astatine","9":"tag-prelims-pointers","10":"tag-upsc-current-affairs","11":"tag-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","12":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}