“The number of isotopes in the world and the universe is limited to a finite number,” he said. “It’s like one of the fundamental things.”

According to an MSU press release, the results not only stake out new territory on the nuclear landscape, but also suggest that variants of everyday elements might exist heavier than scientific models predict.

Geoffrey Koch, communication manager for the MSU Cyclotron Laboratory, said MSU’s rare facilities — the largest nuclear science and research facility on a campus in the U.S. — allow the university to do research that can’t be found elsewhere in the country.

“The facility is one of three facilities in the world to do this kind of research,” he said. “Physics, like all of these other endeavors, is globally competitive. The graduate program in nuclear physics at MSU ranks second to MIT in the U.S. News and World Report.”

The goal of the study, Morrissey said, was to determine the capacity of how many neutrons could be loaded onto a nucleus of a particular element.“What we did is we wanted to know how many neutrons could you put into aluminum and make the nucleus bigger and heavier and at one point the nucleus will just say ‘Stop,’” Morrissey said. “So that’s what we were studying — to see how far you can go and still the aluminum will hold together. We got all the way to aluminum 42 from aluminum 27, so many more neutrons.”