Slashdot Mirror
Chemical Element 110 To Be Named
An anonymous reader writes "According to Nature Magazine, chemists will vote in Ottawa, Canada this week, and are expected to approve the chemical element 110's informal moniker, 'darmstadtium', and give it the chemical symbol Ds. The title honors the Laboratory for Heavy Ion Research (called GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, where the substance was first made. It seems that 'disputes over claimed sightings of new elements have [previously] led to acrimonious and nationalistic battles over naming', but not in this case."
1) What does this mean exactly?
It means that the elements with the number of protons > 92 are not found to exist on Earth naturally.
2) Is it not possible for us to discover other natural elements?
All the elements from 1 to 92 have already been discovered. The heavier elements > 92 are all artificially made.
3) Is it inconceivable that our "new" elements could also be produced under similar conditions in nature?
The conditions for the production of these elements are not part of "nature". They are, however, present in linear accelerators.
4) Have all of these new elements only existed in very small quantities for short periods of time, under controlled conditions?
All the heavier elements have short half-lives which means they only exist for a short amount of time before decaying to different elements. They are also created when stars collapse, etc, but of course they quickly decay into other elements due to their instability.