Question About Natural Elements

[naivefellow]

First of all, obviously I am not naive as my name sounds, but just someone who is curious. I just read the article about Betelgeuse going supernova here + my mild interest in sci-fi made me wonder.

 

Anywhere in the universe, is there a possibility of other natural elements to exist. What I mean is: natural elements as we know, not artificially produced, with stable isotopes. I am aware of the Spectrometer + how astronomers use it to find same elements in many many other planets/stars/other objects in space. Surely there is a chance that we simply miss it because we do not know what we are looking for or do not have the means to detect it or any other reason to explain it.

 

Let's assume that there are some elements that do exist (by our definition of a naturally occurring element), would it have to fit our periodic table or could/would/have to be different?

 

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

[Qfwfq]

Anywhere in the universe, is there a possibility of other natural elements to exist. What I mean is: natural elements as we know, not artificially produced, with stable isotopes.

We can't rule out that, orbiting around some star in some galaxy, there might be a planet full of plutonium and other transuranic elements. We can't rule out a star orbed by a rare earth on which rare earths are not rare at all.

 

However, we do not expect nuclear physics to be essentially different in other places in the universe, so the isotopes that aren't stable here are not stable anywhere unless the fundamental laws of physics are different there.

[Pyrotex]

...Anywhere in the universe, is there a possibility of other natural elements to exist. What I mean is: natural elements as we know, not artificially produced, with stable isotopes.

...Let's assume that there are some elements that do exist (by our definition of a naturally occurring element), would it have to fit our periodic table or could/would/have to be different?...

 

The Periodic Table orders the known elements by the number of protons in the nucleus, N. From N = 1 (Hydrogen) to N = 92 (Uranium). All the numbers in between are accounted for. There are no integers between, say, 42 and 43, waiting to be discovered.

 

It is remotely possible that stable elements of N > 116 might exist.