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Element 118 Created
BuzzSkyline writes, "The heaviest element yet, Element 118, has been created in Dubna, Russia by a collaboration of researchers from Russia's Joint Institute for Nuclear Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US. They created the new element by fusing together Californium (element 98) and Calcium atoms. The achievement comes five years after the scandal-plagued retraction of an earlier claim, which was based on fabricated data, that three atoms of element 118 had been produced at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The achievement was reported on October 9 in the journal Physical Review C (subscription needed to read more than the abstract)."
Element 137 should be the max element: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untriseptium
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118 Is supposed to be the first element of the Magic Island of Stability, doubly magic even.t ml
Most man-made elements (Plutonium+) are incredibly short-lived and make poor paper weights.
Learn something http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3313/02.h
Were that I say, pancakes?
Doh! Sorry, I mean 114. :-/
Were that I say, pancakes?
Perhaps you meant 214? Or something in that range? Last I heard, the island was in the 200-300 range ( but my memeory is fuzzy )
Ha, ha ... There was that long controversy with naming before, so the last time someone thought they'd created 118, they intended to name it Ghiorsium after Albert Ghiorso who "helped discover numerous chemical elements." I'd expect something similarly NOT controversial, while IUPAC will likely settle any disputes like they did for the long-disputed transfermiums in 1997. These are some of the same guys right? so maybe still "Ghiorsium," and maybe we'll find out tomorrow at the press conference. BG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Untriseptium#Signific ance via http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=200807 &cid=16441619
Yeah, but not whatever isotope they created - if I read properly, they discovered they'd made it due to the resultant decay it left.
As he corrected himself in a different child post (which you are free to mod up), the Island of stability doesn't start at element 118. As such, the parent post is dis-informative.
A lot of people seem to be dismissing this as without a practical use. However there is method to the seemed madness of making ever-bigger nuclei. Elements tend to be either stable or unstable - carbon is stable, uranium is not. This stability is caused by the arangement of protons/neutrons in the atoms' nucleii. I'm not exactly sure why this occurs - I'm a biologist, I'm not really meant to know - but whether or not a nulceus is stable or not follows a pattern determined by "shell-model" calculations (see here for the science bit).
So although making 3 atoms of 118 doesn't seem to amount to much, especially as it instantly falls apart, it's another step on the way to making th first of the synthetic heavy elements in a "stability island". It's thought that such a material could have strange and useful properties. Or it could be a complete waste of money and be boring as hell. I don't know, but that's the point of research at the end of the day...
Actually, they created and discovered it, since they had to make it from smaller nuclei before it could be observed.
AFAIK in Asia, they have a 5th one: metal.
Don't confuse chemical stability and nuclear stability. Noble gases win the first game, iron and lead the second one (while for instance Francium sucks at both).
Some other values (leaving off the uncertainty):No clear trend, I'd say.
No, it was named after the most stable political entity of whole Europe, with a record setting 1500 years of continious history, founded by the Franconian Chlodwig in 507, an entity which also fought the most wars since the Middle Age (more than the two runners up United Kingdom and Austria combined) and has the oldest orthographic rules (not changed since about 400 years). You may have some issues with its existance, but most of them are caused by the fact, that this entity is so stable and seemingly undestroyable, even though it sometimes does the trick by weaseling out of consequences ;)
this gives interesting insights - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3313/02.ht ml
Electrons fill out from the inside outward. If you try to take an electron out of an inner, lower energy orbital, then an outer electron will jump down into it. So in the long run you can't have any electrons at all.
The secondary problem is that superheavy elements already have a decay mode in which a proton captures an all-too-close inner electron and becomes a neutron, at which point it's no longer the same element.
You're thinking of electrons as little planet-like objects orbiting the nucleus. Our current best understanding is that they don't follow orbits exactly, so much as they occupy orbitals (volumes of space where you have 90%+ confidence that the electron can be found inside.) The problem with the superlarge nucleii is that for electrons in the innermost shell to avoid absorption, they need to be moving quickly... in the case of elements higher than atomic number 137, faster than the speed of light.)
Procrastination Man strikes again!