both technetium and promethium have been detected in stars

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To Cobalt:

Technetium is certainly a naturally occuring element on planet Earth, except that it has no stable isotopes (It also has the lowest atomic number out of radioactive isotope chains), which means that it will start Beta/Inverse Beta Decay on every single daughter isotope it decays into, which combined with its rather short half life (save Tc99, 98, and 97) means that it is quite rare to see on Earth in its own Decay chain.

Also, it happens that Technetium is produced by natural fission in Uranium Ore or by captured neutrons in Molybdenum Ore. I did not know this could happen, I just learned it recently in one of my projects.

Fun fact: The longest half life of a Technetium isotope (Tc98) is 4.2 billion years. The Earth has existed for around 4.6 billion years. So we can safely assume that we will most likely never see naturally occuring Tc99m isotopes on Earth.

To Sugar cube:

The daughter isotope with the shortest half life is Tc99m, which does not have 10 minutes of half life, but instead somewhere around 6 hours.

To Kevin:

Yes indeed, and that has also been used to proce that stars can produce heavier elements, since these stars have existed for billions of years, and the shortest half life of a Technetium isotope (Read: Above) is 4.2 billion years.

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