Periodic Table Gaining Four New Superheavy Elements
To gain a spot on the periodic table, an element has to pass muster with the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. Elements at the outer bounds of the periodic table are what chemists call superheavy (a reference to their increasing number of atoms, which correspond to their number on the table), and they’re all super unstable. Created artificially by slamming nuclei into one another in the lab, these heavyweight champs last for just tiny fractions of a second before decaying into elements that cannot be detected.
So when someone claims to have identified an element with an all-time high atomic number, the powers that be have to do a little follow-up. In this case, three of the new elements (115, 117 and 118) were approved with credit to a team of Russian and American scientists from the Russian Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, while a fourth they had attempted to claim (113) was credited to a team in Japan after the IUPAC’s assessment.
The elements have the temporary names of ununtrium, ununpentium, ununseptium and ununoctium, which really roll off the tongue. The teams that discovered them can now set about giving them official names.