deuterium

Within the atmosphere were signs of deuterium—a heavy isotope of hydrogen that can result from the breakdown of water.

While free hydrogen atoms that were once part of a water molecule escape into space, free deuterium weighs enough to hang around in the air.

If all of Mars’s water had escaped to space, taking its free hydrogen atoms with it, there would be much more deuterium in the modern day Martian sky relative to the remaining free hydrogen—by some measures, more than twice as much.

Every second, the LUNA experiment fires 100 trillion protons at a target of deuterium.

In 2014, Cooke and co-authors precisely measured the abundance of deuterium in the universe through observations of faraway gas clouds.

From that, they extracted the ratio of the number of deuterium atoms to the number of hydrogen atoms.

They found that there are roughly 1,900 hydrogen atoms for each deuterium atom in the water on Comet 67P.

However, even that ginormous difference still shows about three times the amount of deuterium than we see on our planet.

One chemical test involves measuring the relative amount of deuterium in water.

For example, a common type of meteorite has similar mineral content to Earth, but a lot less deuterium.

Deuterons or alpha particles are obtained in a similar fashion using deuterium or helium gas in place of hydrogen.

"It's true that one of the possibilities in building a hydrogen bomb concerns deuterium," the scientist said.

Well, heavy water is made of one atom of oxygen plus two atoms of deuterium, which is the first isotope of hydrogen.

Then, for a considerably higher price, he would undertake to collect a sample of the deuterium they were using.