8 ms·
The seventh row of the periodic table is now full
- NelsonMinar 11y agoSee also the hypothetical Island of Stability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
- rdancer 11y agoThat's as good as SciFi at the moment, no?
- NelsonMinar 11y agoOne of the scientists working on these elements commented on the Island of Stability on Reddit. "While the next "magic" number of protons is predicted to be 114, 120 or 126, we are still too far away from the next extra stable configuration of neutrons." https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/400w7k/science_ama_series_im_dawn_shaughnessy_from_the/cyqu7or https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/400w7k/science_ama...
- troels 11y agoWhat's the in-joke with the temporary names? (ununtrium, ununpentium ...)
- nostrademons 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_element_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_element_name
- Macha 11y agoPretty sure they're just sort-of-latin for 113-ium, 115-ium etc.
- troels 11y agoI was mostly thinking of the unun part?
- dandelany 11y ago"Ununpent" = "one-one-five"
- Snowdax 11y agoununtrium (element 113) > un un tri > one one three ununpentium (element 115) > un un pent > one one five etc.
- pdpi 11y agoOne is "unum" in latin.
- troels 11y agoThanks, that was what I was missing. I figured it was the un- prefix, which means something like non-existing. (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/un-#Prefix https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/un-#Prefix)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- cperciva 11y agoThe temporary "systematic" names exist due to disputes over element names in the past. Standard practice is that the discoverers of new elements are allowed to recommend names; but there have been arguments over who synthesized a new element first, resulting in American and Russian physicists using different names. The rule now is that the systematic names get used until IUPAC has time to authenticate a discovery and establish whose name will be used. There is one in-joke I've heard about systematic names, though: What's the symbol for Unhexhexium? (Answer: "Uhh...")
- majke 11y agoElement 115 just must be called Elerium! http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Elerium-115 http://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php?title=Elerium-115
- rspeer 11y agoIn other names that are unlikely to happen, ununoctium would be a pretty good candidate to be named "unobtainium". Qualifications include the kind of similar name, its half-life of less than a millisecond, and the bizarre properties it's hypothesized to have if you somehow put enough of it together to have physical properties.
- rdancer 11y agoIsn't that about on the level of calling an actual piece of software "Foobar"?
- mikemaccana 11y agoHere's the current full table (with the seventh row complete): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Discovery_of_chemical_elements.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Discover...
- JumpCrisscross 11y agoWhy are elements 57 and 89 shaded white?
- gnoway 11y agoThose are placeholders for the two rows (lanthanide and actinide series) below the main table.
- derefr 11y agoTo be clear—it's because the periodic table is actually shaped like this: http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM130W/03-BuildingBlocks/Chaos/PeriodicInnerTrans.jpg http://www.chemistryland.com/CHM130W/03-BuildingBlocks/Chaos... I think folding the periodic table like we do makes it much harder for children to understand valence levels. To quote Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_orbital): > The "periodic" nature of the filling of orbitals, as well as emergence of the s, p, d and f "blocks", is more obvious if this order of filling is given in matrix form, with increasing principal quantum numbers starting the new rows ("periods") in the matrix. Then, each subshell (composed of the first two quantum numbers) is repeated as many times as required for each pair of electrons it may contain. The result is a compressed periodic table, with each entry representing two successive elements: 1s 2s 2p 2p 2p 3s 3p 3p 3p 4s 3d 3d 3d 3d 3d 4p 4p 4p 5s 4d 4d 4d 4d 4d 5p 5p 5p 6s 4f 4f 4f 4f 4f 4f 4f 5d 5d 5d 5d 5d 6p 6p 6p 7s 5f 5f 5f 5f 5f 5f 5f 6d 6d 6d 6d 6d 7p 7p 7p That's a table that lets you understand things. --- ...though, taking it absurdly literally, imagine a world where our taxonomy of "elements" was constructed like this, rather than by proton-counting. Hydrogen and Helium would be different isotopes (prototopes?) of the same element. Fluorine and Neon would be the same "element", too. We'd get a strong intuitive sense, even from first hearing about chemicals as children, that certain "elements" have volatile behaviors that can be explained by what they're paired with—Fluorine being so reactive because it's the -1 "prototope" of Neon and really wants to oxidize something so it can have Neon's full valence shell, etc. Or, to go further, imagine we divided our chemical taxonomy by entire subshell—that we just had elements called "1s", "4f", etc. with "prototopes" for uranium, actinium, etc., with their distance from an empty/full subshell represented in their names. It'd be immediately clear what makes certain elements semiconductors: silicon's name would be "3p±4" and, well, that's all you need to know about silicon.
- jacquesm 11y agoWhat are the chances of any more non-radio active elements to be found? Is the current knowledge sufficient to state this will never happen or is there still a very small chance?
- ajuc 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability > Although predictions of the exact location differ somewhat, Klaus Blaum expects the island of stability to occur in the region near the isotope 300Ubn. > Estimates about the amount of stability on the island are usually around a half-life of minutes or days, with "some optimists" expecting half-lives of millions of years.
- fhars 11y agoIt is currently not expected that there will be any stable nucleon configurations between lead and small neutron stars (which cannot really be considered "elements"). On the other hand, we don't know how well the current theories describe elements heavier than the ones we managed to generate (not least because we cannot actually produce much heavier elements yet).
- tizzdogg 11y agoAlso how close is particle physics to generating anything in the eighth or higher periods? Is the leap from 118 to 119 greater than 117 to 118?