An international research team, consisting of scientists from the US, Japan, and South Korea, has created five new isotopes, including plutonium-182, plutonium-183, ytterbium-186, ytterbium-187, and lutetium-190. These elements may have first appeared on Earth and could help scientists reveal secrets about the Earth and the universe. The related paper was published in the fifth issue of Physical Review Letters magazine in 2024.

The five isotopes are the first batch of new isotopes produced by the Rare Isotope Beam Facility (FRIB) at Michigan State University in the US, which is under the Department of Energy's Office of Science. To produce these five new isotopes, the research team fired a beam of platinum ions at a carbon target. Since the experiment began, FRIB has increased the beam power from 50 nanohenries to 350 nanohenries and plans to reach 15,000 nanohenries.

Researchers said that these new isotopes provide new opportunities to enter unknown areas of nuclear research. They will next measure the half-lives and masses of these isotopes. Based on this, they hope to produce more isotopes that would only be found in stars and extremely heavy elements that only exist when neutron stars, the most densely packed celestial bodies, collide.

Scientists assume that elements like gold may have been produced when two neutron stars merged, with gold's "weight" being about 200 times that of hydrogen. By producing isotopes that can only be created by neutron star collisions on Earth, scientists can better explore and understand the process of creating these heavy elements.