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Four New Names Officially Added to the Periodic Table of Elements
- Namrog84 10y agoNihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine and Oganesson
- ars 10y agoThis fills out the last row of the current table. What comes next will be interesting. Will it be a plain row? Or will there be another block like the p-block and f-block (the g-block)? It might not be possible to find out, because the elements might not live long enough to stop being ions and fill their shells. Or maybe we'll find an element in the island of stability somewhere there and we'll use that to find out.
- dnautics 10y agoAt some point (172, they think) it has to stop, because electrons need to go faster than c to orbit. near this point, the electric field of the nucleus pulls electrons out of electron-positron virtual particles ('out of the fabric of space') and you get a "beta+" decay.
- Balgair 10y agoWait, for real? I thought they were just in probability 'clouds' and that they didn't have any momentum.
- ars 10y agoIt's both. They exist at "all" points in their orbit at once (at varying probabilities) as a cloud like you say, but they also have an implied speed (but not velocity since there is no specific direction they are traveling) based on the electric potential they are in.
- Balgair 10y agoEvery time I think I understand QM in any way, inside of a week I am astounded how wrong I was. But I guess that is ok then, as even Feynman said he had no idea what was going on too.
- wyager 10y agoThe naive orbit model predicts a limit of z=137. The Dirac equation (more realistic) predicts z=173. But that's only using QED, no other forces. We could end up being surprised with a much higher maximum limit. One might argue that a neutron star is a counterexample that comes into play when you include gravitation. It's sort of a really big nucleus, with gravity as the dominant attractive force and degeneracy pressure as the dominant repulsive force.
- OscarCunningham 10y agoNeutron stars aren't a counterexample because they have z=0! They have a lot of neutrons but no protons.
- Steuard 10y agoThis isn't entirely true: near the surface of a neutron star, there's a coexistence of neutrons, protons, and electrons in a type of thermal equilibrium. (I'm embarrassed to say that I don't remember offhand how to estimate the ratios involved, but I do remember my PhD candidacy exam committee looking pretty happy with me for deriving it on the fly during my oral. A few days later, one of them commented to a group of us who'd just finished the exam, "Congratulations: at this moment, you know more physics than you ever have or ever will again". I guess he was right!)
- ry_ry 10y agoAs a non-scientist this sounds pretty huge to me, but what actually are these new elements? The article doesn't elaborate. They're all in a similar numeric range, but are these entirely new elements, or other elements recategorised?
- wlesieutre 10y agoThey're all very heavy elements at the bottom of the periodic table and not found in nature. We made them in particle accelerators (they decay very quickly after creation), and have been calling by temporary names until we got around to naming them. For example, element 118 was called "Ununoctium" and abbreviated "Uno". Now it has a real name, "Oganesson" (Og) after one of the discoverers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson
- dalbasal 10y agoAny use for them?
- wlesieutre 10y agoNot directly that I'm aware of, since they decay before you could do anything with them. Just a better understanding of their physics. We've hypothesized an "island of stability" where we might find heavier but more stable elements, but the ones we've found so far aren't it.
- idlewords 10y agoThese are all real elements. They decay within tiny fractions of a second to other stuff, so they're hard to make and study. Think of the nuclei as big, quivering blobs of jelly. They are too big to hold together and really want to split into other stuff. But studying them while they're still in one piece tests our understanding of a lot of basic physics, and lets us compare predictions to reality.
- takingflac 10y agoEdit: Other replies are better. Just going to add that if we create a new element that is stable it will be big news by itself.
- EvanAnderson 10y agoI'm happy to have more usable hostnames for my periodic table-themed Customer sites. I was holding off because "Ununtrium" didn't have a very good ring to it.
- evv 10y agoInteresting that Tennessine and Moscovium are named in honor of Tennessee and Moscow. I wonder many elements on the table are named after places.
- seccess 10y agoInterestingly, four elements of the periodic table are named after a small town in Sweden called Ytterby: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ytterby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ytterby
- foob 10y agoYour forgot Nihonium after Japan :-). It's fairly common for them to be named after places (often where they were discovered). Some other examples are Americium, Berkelium, Californium, Darmstadtium, Dubnium, Europium, Francium, and Germanium.
- ensignavenger 10y agoNihonium is also named for a place- Japan (Nihon)
- Amorymeltzer 10y agoCheck out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_element_name_etymologies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_chemical_element_name_... for a full table. There are a bunch named after places (even copper and magnesium), whether continent (Europium), country (Francium), state (Californium), or even UC Berkeley (Berkelium). All told, nearly 30 are named after different places. I haven't read it yet, but supposedly this book is a fun read with some interesting stories on the discovery of elements: https://www.amazon.com/Periodic-Tales-Cultural-History-Elements/dp/0061824739 https://www.amazon.com/Periodic-Tales-Cultural-History-Eleme...
- simion314 10y agoThere is a youtube channel named "Periodic Videos" that makes incredible videos about elements and molecule, they made a few videos about the new elementsmthis is one of them https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wswa0NuBbMw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wswa0NuBbMw
- sndean 10y agoIUPAC has a much more informative article [0], giving the reasoning behind the names. This was published back before they were officially added to the table, though. [0] https://iupac.org/iupac-is-naming-the-four-new-elements-nihonium-moscovium-tennessine-and-oganesson/ https://iupac.org/iupac-is-naming-the-four-new-elements-niho...
- captainmuon 10y agoI wonder why "Oganesson", where "Oganessium" would sound more conventional and be closer to "Oganessian"? Also, I'm not a chemist, but I thought -ine was reserved for a certain kind of compound?
- vlad 10y agoTraditionally, the names of all noble gases end in "-on", with the exception of helium, which was not known to be a noble gas when discovered. The IUPAC guidelines valid at the moment of the discovery approval however required all new elements be named with the ending "-ium". A new IUPAC recommendation published in 2016 recommends using the "-on" ending for new group 18 elements, no matter whether they turn out to be a noble gas or not. In June 2016 IUPAC announced that it planned to give the element the name oganesson (symbol: Og), in honour of the Russian nuclear physicist Yuri Oganessian, and the name became official on 28 November 2016. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- e2e8 10y agoTennessine is a halogen group element and ends in -ine like all the other halogens.
- vitus 10y agoProbably not, given chlorine, bromine, fluorine, and iodine all end in ine.
- captainmuon 10y agoAh, that's probably the source of my confusion. None of them end in -ine in German. It's Chlor, Brom, Fluor, Iod. OTOH, there are chemicals with names like Hydrazine. It's a bit weird that it is supposed to be called "Tennesin" in German (according to Wikipedia).
- kensai 10y ago115 will always be Elerium for me... :D
- idlewords 10y agoThe recipe for oganesson is pretty amazing. Shoot calcium at californium target for four months to make an atom of it. Repeat as necessary (but remember it has a half-life of under 1 millisecond). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson
- acchow 10y ago"Because of the very small fusion reaction probability (the fusion cross section is ~0.3–0.6 pb or (3–6)×10−41 m2) the experiment took four months and involved a beam dose of 4×1019 calcium ions that had to be shot at the californium target to produce the first recorded event believed to be the synthesis of oganesson.[9] Nevertheless, researchers are highly confident that the results are not a false positive, since the chance that the detections were random events was estimated to be less than one part in 100000." Wow.
- nerdponx 10y agoI wonder how much it cost to make that atom
- kakarot 10y agoAtomic scientists get excited over the littlest things...
- mathattack 10y agoOn a per pound basis?
- bitwize 10y agoGreat choices of names (nihonium and moscovium being a nice counter to Yankee self-back-patting like americium, berkelium, and californium), but I'm still waiting for phlebotinum and unobtainium to get serious consideration...
- coredog64 10y ago> being a nice counter to Yankee self-back-patting like americium, berkelium, and californium When you discover and can produce transuranic elements feel free to name them what you like. Americium was first produced in 1944 by the group of Glenn T. Seaborg from Berkeley, California, at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago, a part of the Manhattan Project.[0] Berkelium [...] is named after the city of Berkeley, California, the location of the University of California Radiation Laboratory where it was discovered in December 1949. [1] Californium [...] was first made in 1950 at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americium [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkelium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkelium [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Californium
- planteen 10y agoNothing beats the village of Ytterby in Sweden... 4 elements named for it! yttrium (Y) erbium (Er) terbium (Tb) ytterbium (Yb) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ytterby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ytterby
- dnautics 10y agoytterby gets ytterbium, yittrium, erbium, and terbium. Dubnium is the "berkelium" - named after the place; Moscovium is the "californium" - named after the region; Ruthenium is the "americium" - named after the country.
- banhfun 10y agoDoes anyone have an image of the periodic table with the new elements in it?
- sndean 10y agohttps://www.iupac.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/IUPAC_Periodic_Table-28Nov16.jpg https://www.iupac.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/IUPAC_P...
- Amorymeltzer 10y agoWikipedia does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:18_column_periodic_table,_with_Lu_and_Lr_in_group_3.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:18_column_periodic_table,...
- euyyn 10y agoWhy is Copernicium (Cn 112) red instead of dark grey?
- EdHominem 10y agoThis is an interesting one. https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/3d-periodic-table-with-a-g-block/ https://jameskennedymonash.wordpress.com/2014/02/11/3d-perio...
- dbg31415 10y agoGiven all the other news today, I halfway expected these new elements to be produced by AWS.
- benmarks 10y agoSorry to be so OT, but at first glance I read this as "Fox News Officially Added to the Periodic Table of Elements" and was left both impressed and bewildered.
- ttflee 10y agoFor Unicode Consortium, there might be four more new glyphs. The Chinese Chemical Society would, most likely, translate these new elements each into a new Chinese glyph. For existing ones, see https://www.iupac.org/publications/ci/2004/2601/3_hao.html https://www.iupac.org/publications/ci/2004/2601/3_hao.html EDIT: It seems that the calling for naming proposals has started: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=zh-CN&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chemsoc.org.cn%2Finfo.asp%3Fgid%3D195&edit-text= https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=zh-CN&tl=en&js=y&p... http://www.chemsoc.org.cn/info.asp?gid=195 http://www.chemsoc.org.cn/info.asp?gid=195 EDIT2: In fact there are quite a lot of existing ancient glyphs in the current Unicode standard. There is possibility an existing Chinese glyph being reused for a new element, as suggested by Chinese Chemical Society in the letter above.
- OskarS 10y agoI'm not a native English speaker, but I did go to an all-English speaking high school. I was a more-or-less conversationally competent in English at the time, but speaking it and learning from it full time in school was a real challenge. I remember clearly that one of the most difficult subjects was chemistry, because everything suddenly had new names and none of them made any sense. Why is it "sodium" instead of "natrium", or "potassium" instead of "kalium", when the elements are Na and K? For the first six months, I had to basically memorize a table of translations between my native language and english, and silently translate everything my teacher was saying to be able to follow along.
- acqq 10y agoThen imagine what the Chinese must learn with the mappings. Regarding the English-German difference in the element names, are there more than these two that don't match? I've found this explanation of the historical context for the different names: https://www.quora.com/Who-renamed-Natrium-and-Kalium-to-Sodium-and-Potassium https://www.quora.com/Who-renamed-Natrium-and-Kalium-to-Sodi... OK, there is also Sauerstoff for oxygen and Wasserstoff for hydrogen.
- josteink 10y agoI'm still disappointed that lemmium didn't make it.
- wfunction 10y agoQuestion: is there any reason to believe the number of elements is not infinite?
- mseri 10y agoAFAIK it is not known how big it could be. However, if you accept the current atomic models, there are serious issues preventing atoms with number higher than 135 (or thereabout), things like the electrons needing to move faster than light to stay around the atom. I think I had read something about a model accepting over 200 elements, but I don't remember the details and could not find the draft it in my library. Update: there is a decent explanation with some reference in the periodic table wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table#Element_with_the_highest_possible_atomic_number https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodic_table#Element_with_...