Whether you are a die hard science enthusiast or just a curious newsreader, you may have heard the news this week that four new elements have been added to the periodic table. Many news outlets and websites are claiming that these elements have just been discovered. However many of these elements are man made in supercollider labs and were synthesized as far back as 2002 or 2003.
The thing which is new about these elements is their respective names. The elements being renamed are elements 113, 115, 117, and 118. When they were first synthesized, they had no proper names and were not even on most periodic tables in chemistry textbooks. However they were soon given names such as Ununtrium, Ununpentium, Ununseptium, and Ununoctium. These names were heavily generic and were only used to represent their respective places in the seventh row of the table.
However, last Wednesday, their nomenclature was given a major makeover. Scientists from the US, Russia, and Japan have proposed new names for these four artificial, elusive elements. However these names although heavily in the works and seriously being considered, have not been officially christened on Ununtrium, Ununpentium, Ununseptium, and Ununoctium.
When naming a certain element, there are certain rules that IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) requires for naming new elements. First the element cannot be named after a fictional character or thing and must apply to the real world. For example: a place, a person, a mineral, a chemical, or a planet or celestial body.
So how do these mysterious elements get created? Again, they are man-made and do not occur naturally. Every element from hydrogen and helium (1 & 2) to Uranium (92) can all be found somewhere in nature in some form or another. However anything beyond that has all been created by man, such as plutonium (94), one of the most toxic and radioactive substance known.
Elements starting from 93 are created by smashing isotopes (unstable versions of regular elements such as calcium or uranium) together at breakneck speeds, creating violent, fiery, microscopic explosions. The newly-created elements last for just minutes, even microseconds, barely enough time for even the best instruments to detect them.
Element 113 (Ununtrium) will be named "Nihonium," after "Nippon," which means "Land of the Rising Sun: The indigenous name for Japan. This is because the lab which created this element first.
Element 115 (Ununpentium) will be named "Moscovium," in honor of the city of Moscow, where many of the element's original creators and the working lab were based in.
Element 117 (Ununseptium) has the least official and recognized name so far. A group of scientists who successfully created this element in their lab in Tennessee wanted to name it "Tennesine," but this same is only beginning to get approval from the IUPAC.
The final and heaviest element to known to humanity is Ununoctium (element 118). It is proposed that this element will be named "Oganesson" in honor of Yuri Oganessian, the Russian scientists who has been the director of JINR (Joint Institute for Nuclear Research), the same institute which discovered most the most recently discovered heavy elements.
No comments:
Post a Comment