Four new chemical elements now have
official names and symbols, the International Union of Pure and Applied
Chemistry (IUPAC) announced this week.
After a five-month review, IUPAC
chemists have approved the four names for superheavy elements 113, 115, 117 and
118 proposed by the elements' discoverers. Such superheavy elements, whose atomic numbers indicate how many protons reside
in each nucleus, don't occur naturally in nature, so they must be created in
labs.
Following tradition, the names
needed to honor a place, geographic region or scientist, with the name endings
following specific protocols related to each element's placement on the periodic table of elements.
Here are the new names:
- Element 113: nihonium (Nh)
- Element 115: moscovium (Mc)
- Element 117: tennessine (Ts)
- Element 118: oganesson (Og)
The IUPAC announced in January that
the four elements would land on the periodic table, though the elements
remained nameless. Then, in June, the IUPAC announced the new names, which had
yet to be finalized. [Elementary, My Dear: 8 Elements You've Never Heard Of]
The five-month window was meant to
give the public a chance to make suggestions or raise concerns about the
element names, considering these names will be used around the world, in many
languages, Cleveland Evans, a professor of psychology who studies names and
naming at Bellevue University in Nebraska and chairs the Name of the Year
committee for the American Name Society, told Live Science in June.
The proposed names seem to have
sailed through unscathed, though that doesn't mean interest was lacking.
"Overall, it was a real
pleasure to realize that so many people are interested in the naming of the new
elements, including high-school students, making essays about possible names
and telling how proud they were to have been able to participate in the
discussions," Jan Reedijk, president of the IUPAC's Inorganic Chemistry Division,
said in a statement. "It is a long process
from initial discovery to the final naming, and IUPAC is thankful for the
cooperation of everyone involved. For now, we can all cherish our periodic
table completed down to the seventh row."
Scientists with Japan's RIKEN
Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science proposed the element name
nihonium, which is one way to say "Japan" in Japanese and means
"the land of the rising sun," according to the IUPAC. Kosuke Morita
and his colleagues created the elusive element on Aug. 12, 2012, after
colliding zinc nuclei together in a thin layer of bismuth.
Like other superheavy elements,
after 113 was created, it quickly decayed, ultimately turning element 113 into
111, and then 109, 107, 105, 103 and finally into element 101, according to
Morita.
Names for elements 115 and 117 were
proposed by their discoverers at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in
Dubna, Russia; the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee; Vanderbilt
University in Tennessee; and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California. Both element names, moscovium and tennessine, honor regions where
experiments linked to creating the elements took place.
The name oganesson, for element 118,
honors Yuri Oganessian "for his pioneering contributions to transactinide
elements research," IUPAC officials said, referring to elements with
atomic numbers 104 through 120. "His many achievements include the
discovery of super-heavy elements and significant advances in the nuclear
physics of super-heavy nuclei, including experimental evidence for the 'island
of stability,'" an idea suggesting that super-heavy elements can become
stable at some point in their existence.
Though there is no certain limit for
the number of protons that can be stuffed into an atomic nucleus, the higher
the number, the more unstable the element, chemists say. Now that the seventh row (called a period) of the periodic table
has been completed with element 118, according to the IUPAC, chemists will
continue to search for heavier elements beyond that.
Original article on Live Science.
