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First Superheavy Element Found In Nature
KentuckyFC writes "The first naturally occurring superheavy element has been found. An international team of scientists found several nuclei of unbibium in a sample of the naturally occurring heavy metal thorium. Unbibium has an atomic number of 122 and an atomic weight of 292. In general, very heavy elements tend to be unstable but scientists have long predicted that even heavier nuclei would be stable. The group that found unbibium in thorium say it has a half life in excess of 100 million years and an abundance of about 10^(-12) relative to thorium, which itself is about as abundant as lead." I'd also like it known that my spell checker did not know 'unbibium' before today, but it is now one word closer to encompassing all human knowledge.
Unbibium is the temporary name, of course. Eventually it will receive another name.
Since it's super-heavy and naturally-occurring, I suggest "Cowboynealium".
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
'To consume more than one class of alcoholic beverage at a time'.
This has been known to university undergrads for centuries...
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
Its quite amazing how singular Nuclei can be found-- What kind of procedures are used to identify specific elements. More importantly, were they only looking for Unbibium or any of the superheavy metals?
Didn't anyone from Area 51 said that a very heavy element like Ununpentium (115) was supposed to shield us from gravity, thus empowering us to create a flying saucer and travel to other stars and galaxies? I guess that Unbibium (122) is even better...
I am so excited!
Unbibium. It does not as of now have this article cited. someone be sure to correct that.
If people can get past, can they get future? Best way to confuse a stoner
Christ - that should be a top level story unto itself... :D
BlackNova Traders
I think its atomic weight it delicious ...
I'm assuming that elements this heavy are produced during a super nova, but nuclei this heavy are a bit extreme...
Anybody know the theory behind what conditions must be met for these nuclei to be formed in the wild?
"The group that found unbibium in thorium say it has a half life in excess of 100 million years and an abundance of about 10^(-12) relative to thorium, which itself is about as abundant as lead."
So how soon can we expect it to turn up in pet food and children's toys?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
All I ever find in thorium are star rubies, blue sapphires, huge emeralds, and Azerothian diamonds.
After all those novels with elements "unknown to man" that sounded so stupid...
"See? See? if 122 is stable, 348 can be stable too. And for all we know, it may absorb magic power."
Here's a link describing the Island of Stability
Neat stuff: apparently they've theorized a bunch of these super-heavy elements, they just haven't been observed yet (until now)!
Having read through this paper, I think it's safe to announce that scientific typesetting is now dead.
You spelled "humor" as "hubris".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Submitter's spellcheck becomes self-aware. In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Spellcheck fights back.
I propose we call it naquadah.
:-)
Now, dig out the gate and get me off this rock
Why do they refer to this as a heavy nucleus rather than as an atom of type 122? I see the terminology elsewhere on searching, but I'm just trying to get a grip on the terminology. Is this just a way of saying it's an atom with a particularly high atomic number?
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Yeah, my spell checker works by regular expressions and only flags items that don't match. It's really simple too.
.*
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
How do you do that?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Now that we've found Naquada, when can we expect the invasion of the Goa'uld? but seriously, if this is confirmed, it would be one of the single greatest discoveries made in physics. a near stable nuclear isotope in the superheavy island of stability: that alone would be amazing but finding it in nature requires that there be a mechanism for synthesizing it and that's even more interesting.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
if only i were born #125
A step closer to discovering Jumboleum ....
How fat are we getting that even newly discovered elements....
Great. There goes my karma rating again..
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Spellcheck suffers a nervous breakdown while viewing lolcatz.
;)
The founder of ICHC is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Normality restored. Whatever constitutes "normal", anyway.
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Are we talking, maybe crack the planet in half with a bomb the size of a cigarette pack, or, just another run of the mill a-bomb.
This is my sig.
I'm a professor of isotope geochemistry.
After reading their paper, it's clear they haven't proven their case. There are *so* many possible explanations for the handful of counts they observed that this result should be ignored. Let me give a few:
- Molecular ions. They say there are no known molecular ions at this mass, I say BS. There are lots of observed molecular ions out there whose exact atomic makeup we haven't figured out. The worst is the interference on 87Sr that screws up lots of icpms age dating work and is not 87Kr (or we could correct for it). But there are others.
- Hydrocarbons: They say there are no hydrocarbons in the blank -- have they ever thought of hydrocarbons that are only ionized when lots of other things (ie a sample) is being ionized? No. They exist though, and are difficult to rule out. They didn't try very hard on this one. Try aspirating a solution of something else (U maybe, or Pb) and see what they get on 292. I'll bet there are counts, and they're not superheavies.
Another reason to be skeptical is that their Th solution is chemically purified. How are they going to do that without getting rid of the superheavy, which is after all not Th, and will be removed by any chemical process.
This is highly dubious work.
Let's say it has a half-life of around 100 million years then. But how are they formed? I thought only heavy naturally occuring elements were formed in high energy situations like supernovae, but this is would be a relatively speaking short timeframe.
So how are minerals with a "short" half-life formed on Earth? Wouldn't it require a quite immense energy to fuse these atoms? I suppose the Earth has to have the energies necessary, but... What's this talk about supernovae being required to fuse atoms heavier than iron (unlike typical star fusion that I believe can go as far as this) all about in that case?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I've actually been waiting for them to find abundant quantities of unbibium in nature so that I could finally eat my unlobsterium.
/ducks
Naqadaium would be an excellent name for Unbibium 292.
Maybe is a missing piece of information in the original article. Chernobyl? Bikini Island? Geneva? Roswell? Maybe could be "natural" in those places and not in the rest of the world/nature.
How do you propose making a bomb made up of material with stable nuclei?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Actual knowledge on slashdot - its a miracle!
*drinks more coffee*
If it's a new super heavy element then at least give it a super heavy name like "Herculium", "Atlasium" or something.
"Unbibium" sounds like it came from the mouth of a chemist who has just discovered far too much ethanol.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Surely another world first is a Slashdot editor using a spell checker before posting... ;-)
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Unobtainium still hasn't been found
I was just wondering why they didn't seize the opportunity to name something "Adamantium" or maybe that will be saved for and alloy it's used in down the road...
"The irony when tending a flock of sheep is the dogs you put in place to protect them are genetically mutated wolves"
Is it ununbium or unbibium? Because I have been playing this game the last few days, which has ununbium: http://www.sporcle.com/games/elements.php Some of those names are just too difficult to remember, let alone type. Ah, well, in the end, they probable name it after the research group or astronomic object where they found the damn thing anyway. Any chemists in the audience?
Super-heavy, let me guess, it's a Web 2.0 Web Page?
These scientists are dumb. All metalhead knows that Manowar band members's balls are full of Heavy Metal elements... After all they are the Kings of Heavy Metal....
Oh, boy! Time to navigate over to United Nuclear to pick up a gram of this stuff for my element collection!
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Can we kill people err terrorists with it?
The last electrons to go in are 5g electrons. So, these nuclei have the only non-excited 5g electrons. It adds another step to the periodic table. This is super neat.
Extra steps.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
At this point I'd like to recommend John C. Wright's "Golden Age":
http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue110/john_wright_rev.html
It's a bit hard to read actually with lots of far future predictions that may or not make it, but that makes it good SF in my book.
A stable superheavy atom is one of them. Sense filters for live editing of your own sense input to accomodate your personal preferences like making everybody look and behave like a Victorian - who may in turn see you as a bit avatar speaking in binary. Editing of personalities say to merge with others, creating completely new neuroforms.
This paper was posted on arXiv, and has not withstood peer review. Say all you want about the wonders of being able to publish freely, but a lot of what you find there is not valid. Wake me up when someone confirms their findings.
Even if your bomb can convert matter to energy with 100% efficiency, it's limited in the amount of energy that it can produce. e=mc**2 and all that, about 20 kilotons per gram.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
So the "island of stability" beyond the transuranics does exist. And it's bigger than expected. Interesting.
Well, Bob?
what do you think?
They're using their grammar skills there.
As we all know, contradictory facts have no place here!
Obligatory Back To The Future Reference:
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I can has deus ex machina plz? KTHXBAI.
Program Intellivision!
Unbibium is just a placeholder. A permanent super heavy name would be something like cheneyum.
How do you propose making a bomb made up of material with stable nuclei?
Maybe I'm wrong, but I would think that, if the element has a half-life, by definition, it is not stable.
This is my sig.
Long ago there was found considerable evidence for heavy elements. If you peer at any chunk of mica you can find long dark tracks, longer and darker than are caused by any known type of radioactive decay. The trick is finding incontrovertible proof of these atoms *before* they decay. If they have short half lives (short as in under ten million years or so), it's going to be hard to find their needleness in the haystack.
At least it seems like you could use some of the latter.
Since other elements are more common, couldnt certain types of the less heavy radioactive elements just be decay remnants of unbibium?
Not if those other elements are both more common and less stable than the new guy. Though since thorium is extremely stable, I suppose that couldn't be ruled out. Unlikely though, since the energy required to form this stuff would be monstrous.
Presumably this guy was formed as a very rare event in a supernova, with a (relatively) substantial portion of the original material remaining. If the half life is over 100 million years as claimed then the math could work out - for instance, assuming 150 million year HL, a 4.5 billion year age of the earth, and their claimed 10^-12 concentration of the stuff in thorium would have given an original concentration of 0.1% of the stuff in thorium at the time of the creation of the earth.
In principle, an element doesn't have to be unstable in order to be able to participate in chain reactions (uranium is almost stable). If it were completely stable, you could probably use something else to start the chain reaction.
Phht, who cares about that any more?
I'd like to find more Khorium and Eternium, and my bank is overflowing with Adamantium.
Although it'd be hilarious to see someone get 1 'unbibium' for every 10^12 units of thorium prospected. They'd be like "WTF?"
-Styopa
It's been a long time, but I had read something about a prediction that element 126 was the expected stable superheavy. Just as electrons have shells, and filled shells make elements chemically neutral (like the noble gasses), neuclei have energy shells that occupy a lower ground state energy when completely filled. Based on the known elements, 126 was predicted.
Here's some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbihexium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/news/84/i10/8410notw9.html
1-2-2, un-bi-bi vs 1-1-2, un-un-bi.
Simple, isn't it?
'unbibium' is just an anagram for 'Chuck Norris'
Did they *calculate* the half-life or did they *measure* it?
Time to go farming in Burning Steppes for this new material.
Yes, but with a half life of hundreds of millions of years, it's probably not easy to get a chain reaction from it.
Unbibium? Bleah. The systematic element naming system is just totally soulless.
I get the point of it, but still... why even bother with a system to give, say, Element 118 the temporary name of "Ununoctium"? What's wrong with just "Element 118" or just "118"?
Isn't that a question on the MEYER'S briggs personality test?
Compressing an element with a 100-million-year+ half life enough to achieve critical mass would take an implosion that would dwarf the yield of the nuclear material and may, as you say, "crack the planet in half". Definitely not cigarette-pack size, though - Think small moon. Would be a dream challenge for an explosives engineer, though.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Isn't that a question on the MEYER'S briggs personality test?
I didn't know they had a letter set called IDMM - or insanely dictatorial mass murderer. I guess if they did, though, millions of twenty somethings would be trying to game the test so they could be something "cool".
Then, a bunch of talking heads would get wind of the skewed test scores and immediately start beating the results into their own political agenda. We'd have guys on the right show that kids wanting to be mass murderers is proof that left wing values have failed and we'd have guys on the left arguing that this is proof that George Bush wrecked America far beyond imaginable.
From there, a number of white papers and blogs would produce 50 million pages of articles, and we'd argue it to the ground on slashdot, for political points. At somepoint, someone will post that in fact, we on slashdot are the people most likely to game the test to skew the results because we thought it would be funny to have a corporate test say that we were mass murderers. But they would be modded down as a troll.
This is my sig.
I thought that the standard American was clasified as a "superheavy" object. Although the McDonalds diet is hardly natural.
At that scale, you might do better to build a reactor fueled by that explosive material and focus the energy on the target via a beam of some sort.
And of course you'll have to find a suitable location to test it once it's fully operational...
That's the stuff, yep.
The important question is, can we separate it out and use it to make bullets with a truly exceptional sectional density?
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
Everything has a half-life
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
One of the places considerred for finding 122,124,& 126 is in the X-ray adsobtion lines in super-novas. Then look at how those lines change over time, and half-lives can be measured.
:-)
btw we can be assured that it is VERY unlikely that 126 is stable since we can't find any of it. We can be quite sure that anything with a half-life of >1Byr would be findable in some amount in all the searching that has been done.
Also, although 126 is 'perfect' in terms of protons, it is far from perfect in nuetrons, that is why 122 and 124 are more often sought, a little low on protons and a little high on the nuetrons might still find a some-what stable nucleaus.
It is VERY exicting news though. Element 122 with such a massive nucleaus will have a number of very special properties.
They claim it's half-life is about 10e8 years. Since our solar system is very roughly 1e10 years old, that's about 100 half-lives, or a decrease by a factor of 2^100 or about 1e30. Since its atomic weight is 292, that suggests that an original sample of about 292e7 grams should have decayed to 1e7 moles * 6e23 at/mol / 1e30 = 6 atoms left. In other words, an original chunk of this stuff of mass 2,920,000 kilos would have decayed to 6 atoms. But when you condsider how much mass of all sorts of elements exist on the earth, and take into account chemical concentration, one would think more of this stuff would be around.... maybe. Does anyone know about the frequency of discovery of naturally radioactive isotopes with a similar half-life that are not part of the decay path of other longer lived radioactive isotopes? In other words, is it reasonable to expect to find significant quantities of something with a half-life of around 1e8 years that isn't being formed from other decay products any more?
Also, if the reason it is so rare is because so little was formed, perhaps that indicates it is extremely hard, even in a supernova, to create this element? What does that suggest about our ability to artificially synthesise this element?
Very interestng....
Scientist points at periodic table. "See it goes up to 292."
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
A staple surprise of scifi is having scientists freak out over alien material made up of an element or elements not of earthly origin. This sounded pretty cool until I met the periodic table and saw that we pretty much know everything that occurs in nature and any artificial elements can only be produced a few atoms at a time in particle accelerators and fall to pieces in picoseconds. I'd read something about a theory that there could be islands of stability far down the line of trans-uranic elements, artificial elements that can survive outside of the accelerator.
So, is that a bunch of bull or does it seem likely? And if so, can we make any predictions about the characteristics of these elements? Personally, I'm still astounded at how the elements work to begin with, how they can be gaseous or liquid or solid all based on the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons. To think that elements can transmute, decay from one type to another, too crazy.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Which means this is the first true, actual, working, 100% correct terrorist detector. Just irradiate someone with Thorium, and if they die, they weren't a terrorist.
Note that a terrorist can become ill from thorium, so it is not sufficient to administer a sub-lethal dose. Only death proves that someone is innocent.
The enemies of Democracy are
same persuasion, the elements which you seek will be known as "Unobtanium", so, even if you manage to CESiUM and get on you Man Ga Knees, there well be NO Bellium for you... U will just Bohrium... but not be bored...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Or just give lots of people cancer. Either one.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Note to self: Stop putting jokes in my insightful comments so I can get something other than +1 Funny!
It seems to be outside the predicted location of the Island of Stability.
Here (122 protons, 170 neutrons)
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
133thium?
Incredible discovery. This might to so many similar discoveries. I have waited a long time for something like this to happen.
I, for one, welcome our new superheavy overlords!
I thought is was pretty exciting news too. I had a friend who was some type of chemist many, many years ago who explained to me the concept of Islands of Stability for super heavy elements. It was his contention that such elements would be found one day. I hope this can be confirmed. It shouldn't be to hard to refine this from Thorium deposits - which the FA says are almost as abundant as lead. Perhaps we could smash nuclei of this material together and make black holes or antimatter or something. Imagine the mass such a nucleus could pack traveling at nearly the speed of light. Now I have one wish remaining - the creation/discovery of metallic hydrogen stable at room temperatures.
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wikip Unobtainium:
== External links ==
* [http://home.tiac.net/~cri/2003/unobtanium.html A Note on Unobtanium]
* [http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-uno1.htm World Wide Words -- Unobtanium]
* [http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technology/elevator_update_020819.html Going Up? Private Group Begins Work on Space Elevator]
* [http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=536664&cid=23227380 First proposal that element 404 be considered unobtainium]
[[Category:Fictional materials]]
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
"It is VERY exicting news though. Element 122 with such a massive nucleaus will have a number of very special properties. "
Yes, I can just imagine Iraq (or Iran?) littered with fragments of depleted unobtanium.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
It's obviously Naquadah. It's basically not found in nature on earth, but is plentiful in other places. We've got a huge sized asteroid of it somewhere not too far away, though. I just hope they don't try to make naquadria.
... Robert Lazar, perhaps? The guy who everyone thinks is a complete nutter with his claims of everything he was involved in at Area 51 (and those works being the reason he's occasionally chased by the MiB)? I seem to remember something talking about him also referencing Element #115, though I just can't remember.
Phil Schneider (www.philschneider.org) was murdered for talking about how many elements are really known, versus what is taught in the schools.