Is there an island where superheavy atoms last?

The island of stability is a prediction, not a place anyone has reached. It is a predicted set of isotopes of superheavy elements that may have considerably longer half-lives than known ones, and its existence is attributed to predicted magic numbers of protons and neutrons.

Heavy nuclei are fragile. Strong-force binding grows linearly with the number of nucleons, but electrostatic repulsion grows with the square of the atomic number, so repulsion wins for superheavy nuclei. The liquid drop model suggested that fission would be nearly instant above about 280 nucleons. The shell model said otherwise: nucleons fill shells like electrons in atoms, and a filled shell makes a nucleus more stable. The observed magic numbers for neutrons are 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82 and 126, and the next one is predicted to be 184. The island is generally thought to center near copernicium and flerovium isotopes, close to that closed neutron shell.

Estimated half-lives in the island are usually minutes or days, with optimists proposing millions of years. Searches in nature came up empty, and the proton magic number is still not agreed: estimates range from 114 to 126.

So far there is a tease. A single atom of element 114 made in 1998 lived 30.4 seconds and was hailed as a textbook example, but that chain was never observed again and its assignment remains uncertain. Later superheavy elements did outlive their initial predictions. Known nuclei reach only 177 neutrons, short of 184, but stability grows as they approach it: 285Cn has a half-life almost five orders of magnitude longer than 277Cn.