The team estimated that xenon-124's half-life is about 18 sextillion years — or 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years — which is than one trillion times the age of our universe, according to the team. It's the slowest process ever measured directly, the team wrote in a statement.
Their dark matter detector witnessed the rarest event ever recorded: the radioactive decay of xenon-124.
While most xenon isotopes have half-lives of less than 12 days, a few are thought to be exceptionally long-lived, and essentially stable. Xenon 124 is one of those, though researchers have estimated its half-life at 160 trillion years as it decays into tellurium 124.
Xenon-124 is one such elder statesman: Its half-life is one trillion times longer than the age of the universe, and as such, the chance of detecting its decay is very small.
The half-life of xenon-124 — that is, the average time required for a group of xenon-124 atoms to diminish by half — is about 18 sextillion years (1.8 x 10^22 years), roughly 1 trillion times the current age of the universe. This marks the single longest half-life ever directly measured in a lab, Wittweg added.
The rarest mineral on Earth is kyawthuite. Only one crystal, found in the Mogok region of Myanmar, is known to exist. Caltech's mineral database describes it as a small (1.61-karat) deep orange gemstone that the International Mineralogical Association officially recognized in 2015.
Only 1-in-10,000 galaxies fall into the rarest category of all: ring galaxies.
Kyawthuite – A rare mineral, Kyawthuite is also categorized as a natural bismuth antimonate. Kyawthuite was found near Mogok in Myanmar.
The rarest animal in the world is the vaquita (Phocoena sinus). It is a kind of critically endangered porpoise that only lives in the furthest north-western corner of the Gulf of California in Mexico. There are only 18 left in the world. It is thought that they may be extinct in ten years.
Ryan Holiday on Twitter: ""The rarest of human qualities is consistency." — Jeremy Bentham" / Twitter.
Ring galaxies are some of the rarest galaxies found throughout our universe, and for years scientists have scratched their heads, trying to figure out exactly how these galaxies came to be.
A: "The most beautiful thing in the universe is the human ability to comprehend it. "Our universe is extraordinarily complex, with processes occurring on all scales, from the subatomic world to the universe at large.
These explosions generate beams of high-energy radiation, called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which are considered by astronomers to be the most powerful thing in the universe. What's more, these GRBs could be killing our chances of ever discovering life on other planets.
The one that appears most infrequently (rarer than the rarest personality type and rarest eye color, though not quite as rare as the rarest hair and eye combination) is heterochromia, or having different-colored eyes.
According to the golden ratio of facial beauty, she is the most beautiful girl in the world. According to a study conducted by Dr.Julian DeSilva, supermodel Bella Hadid has the most perfect face with beauty test score of 94.35%, followed by singer Beyonce and actress Amber Heard.
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart.”-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince: ...
It takes 250 million years for our Sun and the solar system to go all the way around the center of the Milky Way. We can only take pictures of the Milky Way from inside the galaxy, which means we don't have an image of the Milky Way as a whole.
It is estimated that there are roughly 200 billion galaxies (2×1011) in the observable universe. Most galaxies are 1,000 to 100,000 parsecs in diameter (approximately 3,000 to 300,000 light years) and are separated by distances on the order of millions of parsecs (or megaparsecs).
The small galaxy of IC 1613, which is 2.3 million light-years away is notable for its lack of cosmic dust swirling among its scattered stars and the bright pink gas that gives it its unique color.
Two dark matter-less galaxies shed light on ghostly galaxies that are usually dark matter rich. Ghosts are everywhere — ghost galaxies, that is. Some are the size of the Milky Way or even bigger, yet they have so few stars that they're extremely faint, virtually see-through, and difficult to detect.
Among the characteristics that might be deemed uniquely human are extensive tool use, complex symbolic language, self-awareness, deathawareness, moral sensibilities, and a process of cultural evolution that, while necessarily rooted in biology, goes well beyond standard biological evolution per se.