Science | June 14, 2009 | 5 comments

Periodic table adding new element

source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/11/element_112_added_to_periodic_table/

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Apocalipstick
Move over, Roentgenium. There's a new super-heavy chemical element joining the periodic table.

The yet-to-be-named "element 112" has been officially recognized by the table's governing body, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.

A team of scientists, lead by Sigurd Hofmann at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung (Centre for Heavy Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany are credited with its discovery.

"The new element is approximately 277 times heavier than hydrogen, making it the heaviest element in the periodic table," the scientists said in a statement.

Hofmann and his team first synthesized the element in 1996 by firing charged zinc atoms through a 120 meter-long particle accelerator into a lead target. The zinc and lead nuclei were fused to form the new element.

An element's atomic number indicates the number of protons in the nucleus. Element 112 is the sum of the atomic numbers of the two initial elements, zinc having the atomic number 30 and lead the atomic number 82.

Element 112's mass number (the sum of protons and neutrons in the nucleus) was calculated by measuring the energy emitted by the particle as it decayed. Because the element is so large and unstable, it can only exist for a mere fraction of a second before decaying into other elements.

The induction of element 112 is the team's sixth to be confirmed and added to the periodic table in 30 years.

While GSI was able to repeat the creation of the new element in 2000, it wasn't until independent teams, including one at the RIKEN heavy-ion facility in Japan, that IUPAC's requirements of verification were met. In total, only four atoms of the element have ever been synthesized and identified.
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5 comments // Periodic table adding new element

  • cattheawesome
    • 0
      cattheawesome  

    • hooray for making crazy heavy tiny things with memorable names!! my brother does this stuff, or something similar. a few times a year he writes out a simplified explanation of his experiments, and a few times a year i manage to remember that the laboratory is surrounded by lead. or maybe he stands behind lead. something with lead. come on, physicists! not all of us breathe calculus! give us something simple, but not forgettable. "ununbium" sounds like "an ambien" slurred by a drunk housewife, another crazy, heavy, tiny thing. lady. whatever. it's a mnemonic waiting to happen, a rung in the ladder hoisting me out of the hell of Physics for PHAGS* (required course to graduate for bachelor of arts or soft-science majors at any "well-rounded" institution) the last semester of my senior year.
      what do you do with created elements that fizzle out after a fraction of a second? there better be a time machine coming out of all this, or i want my money back.

      *PHAGS: psychology, history, anthropology, gender studies, & sociology majors.

    • 2 years ago
  • dreamsenvoy
  • lizipooo
  • CryoKeen
  • cztheday
    • 0
      cztheday  

    • Very cool -- the "Brigadoon" of elements (mythical Scottish town that exists in our world for only one day every hundred years)...

    • 2 years ago
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