By Kwame Opam
After four years of painstaking
research, the discovery of the periodic table's 117th element has been
confirmed. Element 117, otherwise known as ununseptium, was originally discovered back in 2010
by a group of American and Russian physicists with the Joint Institute
for Nuclear Research (JINR). However, it has taken years for the
discovery to be replicated by another independent team, which the
International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) requires. Now
the element, with the approval of the IUPAC, can be named and added to
the periodic table, extending our understanding of transuranium
elements.
The newest instance of element 117 was created by a team at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Germany, whose findings were published in Physical Review Letters.
Like the team at the JINR, the group managed to create the element by
firing Calcium isotopes at radioactive Berkelium — which is no simple
task. "Making element 117 is at the absolute boundary of what is
possible right now," Professor David Hinde of the Australian National
University told I Fucking Love Science. As with other
transuranium elements, ununseptium is highly unstable, and has a brief
half life of about 80 milliseconds. However, that's still longer than
expected, suggesting that there may be an "island of stability" beyond
element 118 where elements have half-lives of hours, days, or even
years. With the confirmation of element 117 comes, according the paper's
authors,"an important step towards the observation of even more
long-lived nuclei of superheavy elements located on an 'island of
stability.'"
oped: Ha I am more interested in *Weird Science *
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