What is the lifespan of an atom? Are they immortal?
Does an atom have a lifespan, in other words, how long does it last? Do atoms possess immortality?
There are some people that think that diamonds are forever, but the truth is that they aren't. Your sparkling rock will degrade into plain graphite, if you leave it alone for a long enough period of time. Diamonds are made of carbon atoms, however, and carbon atoms are something that stays the same for a long time, if not for eternity. Carbon isotopes have been found to last a very long time, compared with the estimated age of the universe, indicating that more stable isotopes of carbon can survive for longer periods of time than the age of the universe itself.
It is worth noting, however, that certain carbon atoms do not have an eternal existence. Radioactive elements are chemical elements that have an unstable nucleus and emit radiation when the nucleus decays into a stable state. The term radioisotope comes from the fact that they are chemical elements with an unstable nucleus. There is the possibility that after 5,730 years, the carbon-14 atom can lose an electron, thus becoming nitrogen-14 (which is a stable form of nitrogen and one of the most prevalent forms of nitrogen on Earth). Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope which has a half-life of less than 6,000 years, which means after 5,730 years it is 50% likely that the atom can lose an electron, thus becoming nitrogen-14.
Carbon-14 is considered to be the most important element when it comes to carbon dating. It is assumed that radioactive carbon can only be absorbed by living organisms through respiration, and by evaluating the remaining levels of carbon-14 in their bodies, it can be determined when the person died. Carbon-14 is just one example of the many radioactive isotopes that naturally occur, and there are more than a thousand has been synthetically produced. This is a property of radioisotopes containing the tendency to decay into other radioactive isotopes at various rates. While some elements achieve this in a matter of a few days, others do so in a matter of hundreds of millions of years. In other words, it is true that these atoms do indeed die over a long period of time. You can also say they are simply reborn as different isotopes with a different chemical composition, which is yet another way to view it.
It may be possible for an atom, even if it seemed to be the most stable, to suffer a death through some mysterious mechanism. A couple of exotic theories of physics suggest that protons (as well as electrons and neutrons, the particles that make up atoms) can decay into lighter elements. However, even in the event that protons decay, they seem to retain an incomprehensible durability. The half-life of a proton, from experimental studies, has been approximated to fall between the range of 1033 and 1034 years, which is approximately 23 orders of magnitude over the age of the universe at present. As a result, it can be concluded that atoms, to the best of our knowledge, cannot die under any circumstance, regardless of what timescale it is.