Four new chemical elements discovered! – Point

This is a type of ad to lead to the renewal of all the chemistry textbooks! The famous table of chemical elements, or periodic table – the name of the Russian scientist who produced the first version in 1869 – has just added four new items. So now its seventh full line displays. These newcomers numbered 113, 115, 117 and 118, according to their atomic number – that is to say the number of protons present in the nucleus – are however too heavy, especially unstable to exist in nature . This is why researchers around the world have been cunning and patience to successfully make them appear even very furtively in their laboratory, with particle accelerators.

Nevertheless , the efforts of both teams ended up paying, successful by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has just officially recognize their discoveries. The first Russian-American team, following a collaboration between Dubna Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, was awarded the authorship of the elements 115, 117 and 118. While that a Japanese team led by Professor Kosuke Morita, the institute Riken scientific research, won that of the element 113.

A first for an Asian country

the first Asian team to officially discover a chemical element in the periodic table, the decision of IUPAC reward seven long years of toil. For if Kosuke Morita thought since 2004 have made the element 113 by bombarding a thin bismuth layer (element 83) with zinc ions (element 30) spinning about 10% of the speed of light, the evidence he brought had not been considered sufficient. It took him cause two other appearances, including one based on a different experience of sending a sodium beam (element 11) against a curium target (item 96), to achieve convincing. This gives a thin outline of the puzzle which these explorers of the infinitely small to face.

Regardless, the game was well worth the effort because, better than gold the Olympics, these scientists will now have the great honor to baptize these new chemical elements, tentatively called ununtrium (113) ununpentium (115) Ununseptium (117) and ununoctium (118). For element 113, the name “japonium” is already mentioned. But Kosuke Morita wants to take the time to think twice. It must be said that the stakes are high.

Meanwhile, the Japanese and his team have already begun to attack the elements 119 and 120, in the hope of reaching, perhaps , what chemists call “island of stability” predicted by the theory, namely combinations of protons and neutrons giving heavy but stable atoms. While, so far, all atoms heavier than uranium (element 92) that men were able to reveal themselves almost immediately disintegrated.