A research team is using astrophysical explosions to understand the mysterious forces at work in some of the smallest ...

Almost all the mass of an atom is concentrated in its nucleus in the form of protons and neutrons. Some nuclei are intrinsically unstable, existing for only a short time before decaying into stable ...

Physicists have found a new “island of inversion” in the nucleus of molybdenum-84, a perfectly balanced atom with equal numbers of protons and neutrons. The discovery upends a decades-old assumption ...

The fact that the neutron is slightly more massive than the proton is the reason why atomic nuclei have exactly those properties that make our world and ultimately our existence possible. Eighty years ...

Conventional neutron numbers are based on the approximations that the mass of the electron is zero and that those of the proton and neutron are each equal to unity. It was shown, by using the exact ...

An international team of physicists has measured the mass of a "strange" atomic nucleus with the aid of an innovative technique that is capable of significantly greater precision than that of previous ...

When it comes to weighty matters, quarks and gluons rule the universe, a new study confirms. One of the largest computational efforts to calculate the masses of protons and neutrons shows that the ...

Neutron stars harbor some of the most extreme environments in the universe: their densities soar to several times those of atomic nuclei, and they possess some of the strongest gravitational fields of ...