Periodic Table To Welcome Two New Elements

adeelarshad82 writes "Chemistry's periodic table can soon welcome livermorium and flerovium, two newly named elements, which were announced Thursday (Dec. 1) by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The new names will undergo a five-month public comment period before the official paperwork gets processed and they show up on the table. Three other new elements just recently finished this process, filling in the 110, 111 and 112 spots."

Comments

Rejected again!

[cashman73]

Will they ever name an element Colbertium, after Stephen T. Colbert, DFA?

Re:Rejected again!

[tripleevenfall]

Hasbeenium?

Re:Rejected again!

[JavaBear]

Or Roadrunnium, because it has a half life so fast you won't be able to catch it.

Re:Rejected again!

[circletimessquare]

Strange.

I've read comment threads where name droppping Stephen Colbert makes you look like a genius compared to everyone else posting, and here we have a context where name dropping Stephen Colbert makes you look like an idiot.

Re:Rejected again!

[JavaBear]

Of course after Roadrunnium, we need Wileeum and Coyotium, though it'll be unwise to put either of those in the vicinity of the highly unstable Ajaxium.
The proximity of either Eileeium or Coyotium with Ajaxium is known to create a localized reality nullification field, and we all know how much serious scientists hates it when reality stops taking them seriously, and starts making or changing it's own rules.

Re:Rejected again!

[colinrichardday]

It's Acmeium, not Ajaxium.

When does comment period begin for Element 115?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a number of people to coordinate in order to make sure it ends up with the name Elerium.

Real elements - or theoretical?

[raydobbs]

Were these stable elements - or did they exist as a product of some super-collision for fractions of a second?

Re:Real elements - or theoretical?

[eric_brissette]

FTA - "All five of these elements are so large and unstable they can be made only in the lab, and they fall apart into other elements very quickly. Not much is known about these elements, since they aren't stable enough to do experiments on and are not found in nature."

Re:Real elements - or theoretical?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem probably comes from several parts. Mostly, the 'Atom', which came from Greek 'atomos': something that couldn't be made any smaller. It was the basic 'element' forming everything else, the building blocks of the universe.

What was stated to be indivisible was found to be: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Those things that made up atoms... thus proved that we COULD cut the uncutable. And now those three parts are being subdivided further, into quarks.

So it isn't exactly that elements are indivisible. It's just that the myriad of parts making them up (Protons, Neutrons, and that cloud of Electrons hovering around the nucleus) may change, with some of the changes drastically affecting the element enough that it's no longer what it is; the cases of elements like Uranium breaking down and becoming other elements is what happens with nuclear reactors (with us just harvesting the heat byproduct to make steam to turn turbines to generate electricity). The reverse can happen; combine two elements (say... Hydrogen) and fuse them together, and you can end up with a different element (Helium, among others). Same principle; the 'divisible' parts of the atoms are pushed together so that their nuclei join, and now the new single element changes with its new contents.

The interesting thing will be how long it'll take to divide quarks into even smaller bits of 'something'... and whether it's turtles all the way down.

Re:Real elements - or theoretical?

[Brett Buck]

An element is defined by the number of protons in the nucleus. Not by the number of protons in the nucleus that happen to stay together for a "long time (TBR)".

Re:Real elements - or theoretical?

[newcastlejon]

Allow me, then.

If you define an element as something that "cannot be broken down any further" you exclude anything that decays into lighter elements, such as uranium or radium. You also exclude substances that can be induced to break down through various means.

However, it's not a problem if you refine the definition slightly: an element is that which cannot be broken down chemically. You can't turn an atom of X into a lighter atom of Y just by mixing chemicals together in a beaker (no offence, chemists, I'm just trying to illustrate a point). Fire X through a particle accelerator hard enough, though, and sometimes it breaks apart into smaller/lighter pieces when it hits something.

Is that better?

Re:Real elements - or theoretical?

[colinrichardday]

There are no stable transuranium elements.

Yet. Perhaps we will find a transuranium island of stability.

Re:Real elements - or theoretical?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Growing up, and being taught in school "elements cannot be broken down any further."

It's always nice to run into a fellow member of the Class of 1827 here on /.

Re:Real elements - or theoretical?

[newcastlejon]

No, it's not better. It just punts the problem from the unclear definition of "element" to the unclear definition of "chemically"

Very well, I'll try again, though I suspect I'll fare no better.

"You can't turn an atom of X into a lighter atom of Y just by mixing chemicals together in a beaker"

I can make Uranium into Thorium by mixing two chemicals - Uranium and Uranium (and then waiting for the reaction to finish). Your definition needs to make it clear WHY this is not a chemical reaction.

You can't make thorium from uranium by mixing it with more uranium. The uranium would decay anyway; you wouldn't have actually done anything to bring about the change. Perhaps it's just semantics but this is equivalent to saying you can make a hammer fall when you drop it by saying the magic word when you let go.

We arbitrarily draw a line between "chemical" events and "nuclear" events based on what particles are involved, what they're doing, and so on. But it's still an aribitrary destinction created by humans and there are still oddball situations that straddle the line.

I'm neither a physicist nor a chemist but I was taught that chemical reactions are all about interactions between atoms' electrons and that such interactions don't give rise to changes in the nucleus. I'm happy to be corrected on this point, and I'd be very happy to hear about the line-straddling situations you mention.

Some things just aren't made of atoms in the usual sense. There's positronium, free neutrons, atoms with a bound muon, neutron stars...

Indeed. No argument there.

The superheavy atoms in TFA are a case where the usual definition of element is a bit weak, since their real-world behavior is nothing like that of stable elements.

I'm not going to dispute this either, but I would ask that you consider the atom's point of view. As someone once said (I regret the name escapes me) "[subatomic particles] operate on a different timescale; it may not look like much on my watch but it's eternity to them". Superheavy elements seem to behave very differently to us, but aren't they very much like 'normal' elements albeit with an extremely short half-life?

It might be wiser to redefine "element" in a way that specifically excludes them and call them something else instead, much like we redefined "planet" to exclude Pluto and Eris.

What definition do you suggest? I was merely trying to improve on the faulty one given by saying you can't change one element into another through chemistry.

Re:Real elements - or theoretical?

[c 0xFF]

We haven't found them yet because:

1) Making elements that large is really, really hard
2) Even if there exists an element with a half-life of, say, a few million years, it's been so long since the last supernova that finding one of them in nature would be impossible.
3) We're just now producing elements in the range where we might find more stable elements (according to current theory). These are exciting times, as we explore the boundaries of what we believe to be the island of stability.

Re:Real elements - or theoretical?

[ChrisMaple]

But .. But .. Scientific papers are built out of molecules.

It's so nice to see...

[eegad]

this table is updated periodically.

Re:It's so nice to see...

[Nationless]

I imagine renaming it the sporadic table of the elements wouldn't go down too well with the academics.

Re:It's so nice to see...

[mr1911]

Well, to be pedantic, it's not updated periodically -- that would imply that it gets updated on a regular basis with a predictable cycle. It's updated sporadically.

To be more specific, the periodic table can be thought of as a fungus. The elements are the mycelia of the fungus, and once in a while the table produces fruiting bodies (like mushrooms) that will produce spores for the periodic table to reproduce. It is these fruiting bodies that are the new elements. The spores will be released from these new elements when moisture and temperature conditions are right -- and with luck, a given spore may land upon the wall of another elementary school classroom and become a new periodic table of the elements.

Yet he still doesn't know why he isn't invited to parties.

I see that these are atomic numbers 114 and 116

[idontgno]

Atomic number 115 still hasn't been named (or confirmed, according to TFA), but I know what it should be named when the time comes.