Curium

Curium is a synthetic element in the periodic table that has the symbol Cm and atomic number 96. A radioactive metallic transuranic element of the actinide series, curium is produced by bombarding plutonium with alpha particles (helium ions) and was named for Marie Curie and her husband Pierre.

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The isotope curium-248 has been synthesized only in milligram quantities, but curium-242 and curium-244 are made in multigram amounts, which allows for the determination of some of the element's properties. Curium-244 can be made in quantity by subjecting plutonium to neutron bombardment. Very small amounts of curium may exist in uranium ore as a daughter product of natural decay. There are few commercial applications for curium but it may one day be useful in radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Curium bio-accumulates in bone tissue where its radiation destroys bone marrow and thus stops red blood cell creation.

Synthetic element: The chemical elements labelled as "synthetic" are unstable, with a half-life so short (ranging from a fraction of millisecond to a few million years) relative to the age of the Earth that any atoms of that element that may have been present when the Earth formed have long since completely decayed aw...

Periodic table: The periodic table of the chemical elements, also called the Mendeleev periodic table, is a tabular display of the known chemical elements. First created by Dmitri Mendeleev, the elements are arranged by electron configuration so that many chemical properties follow a regular pattern across the tabl...

Atomic number: The atomic number (Z) is a term used in chemistry and physics to represent the number of protons found in the nucleus of an atom. In an atom of neutral charge, the number of electrons typically equals the atomic number....