2 new Elements —Who Knew?
“Two new elements were officially added to the periodic table this month. The elements were discovered years ago, but they needed approval from an international committee before they could be placed on the famous chart. We asked Ian Chillag and Mike Danforth, producers of NPR’s Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me and hosts of the podcast How To Do Everything, to explore how the process works:
How To Make A New Element
For starters, elements 114 and 116 don’t occur in nature. So don’t look for them in your backyard. That’s because they were made in a lab. Which may seem like cheating, but that’s how it’s done these days.
We called up Paul Karol, chair of The Joint Working Party for the Discovery of New Elements, which gave official approval to the elements, to find out how the process works. And he offered a great explanation that was really long and complicated, so we’ll summarize it thusly:
Smash together atoms of two elements.
Hope their nuclei fuse.
If they do, you have a new element. Congratulations!Now, before you go off smashing atoms together, please note that it’s not as easy as our incredibly oversimplified explanation makes it seem. With elements 114 and 116 in particular, the end product is tiny — and exists for less than a second before it decays away.
So, it’s not like you have a chunk of metal to show off. Instead, you get pages and pages of computer data from advanced sensors.
“These two species combine perhaps once out of a billion billion collisions,” Karol says. “That’s a billion billion. The experiments usually last for a month, and maybe they get one or two indications they’ve made something of interest.”
So once you pull off your one-in-a-billion-billion shot, other scientists have to check your work by doing it again. You can see how this process could take a while.”