October 19 – Happy Birthday, Marguerite Perey!

Posted October 19, 2020


Today's famous birthday was a French physicist, a student of Marie Curie, and the first woman elected to the French Académie des Sciences. 

(If you can believe it, Curie never was!!!)

One of Perey's biggest accomplishments was discovering the element francium. You may have guessed that the name, francium, was chosen because the element was discovered in France.
 



Francium (symbol Fr, atomic number 87) is really unstable, highly radioactive. Its half-life is just 22 minutes. That means that it only takes 22 minutes for half of a clump of pure francium to break down into astatine, radium, and/or radon (depending on the isotope - the number of neutrons - in the francium).


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