[BitwiseFool]

Here's an ignorant question, but my understanding is that every element has an emission/absorption spectra. That being the case, why not point a telescope at some supernova remnant and look for any lines that do not match the known elements. If stable super-heavy elements exist, then they would probably be made in supernovae and the remnant would show signs of those elements, no?

[simcop2387]

I think the main issue it's that they would need to be made in sufficient quantity to show up in the Spectra of the novas and collision. The heavier they are the fewer will be made, making detection harder and harder. You'd also need to calculate all the lines for a given element at the various energy levels to determine if a set of lines match, and that gets nontrivial pretty quickly

[btilly]

I think that that issue is secondary to the fact that the island of stability has predicted half-lives in the range of a year or two. So in order to look for that spectrum we have to have supernovae that have happened very recently and close enough for us to make out the spectrum in what remains.

[simcop2387]

I hadn't seen anything saying a year or two, I think I've only seen predictions on the orders of hours to days which would basically make it impossible to detect on anything that could be reasonably close to us since they'd be around for such a short time and only during/after the brightest part of the whole thing.

[BitwiseFool]

Ah, that makes sense. Thank you.

[wrs]

Not answering your question, but fun fact: helium was discovered by seeing an unexplained emission line in our own sun’s spectrum, which is where it got its name.

[ufo]

The most common theory is that these super heavy elements would more stable, but nevertheless unstable in absolute terms. There are predictions that the half lifes would be on the order of minutes or days. However, all of this is obviously highly speculative.