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Physicists may now have a way to make element 120
- jmclnx 2y agoFor the curious, it is Unbinilium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbinilium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbinilium
- pxndxx 2y agoThat's just a temporary name (un-bi-nil-ium, meaning one-two-zero-ium) and will be assigned a new name once it's actually discovered and verified.
- n4r9 2y agoThe highest atomic number of any synthesised element appears to be Oganesson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oganesson . Only 5 atoms have ever been synthesised. It's speculated to be a solid at room temperature despite belonging to the "noble gas" family. Chemistry is fascinating.
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- hoseja 2y agoAnd it closes the periodic table so nicely. We really shouldn't be trying to go any further until and if they can predict the island of stability with high confidence.
- kamarg 2y ago> We really shouldn't be trying to go any further until and if they can predict the island of stability with high confidence. I don't know much about chemistry since I haven't done anything with it in the last 20ish years. What need is there to be able to accurately predict it before attempting to synthesize it?
- ufmace 2y agoThe way this stuff seems to work, it doesn't make sense to go theory-first. We can spin up a bazillion theories about it, with no clue which if any are anywhere near true. We've got to just try it, gather experimental data, and see if we can build any more solidly-backed theories around that data.
- somenameforme 2y agoI think that's the way science pretty much always goes. For the most clear example look at the unbelievable mountain of information we have on the distant cosmos. Yet it all assumes the homogeneity of physics in the universe. There's no real reason to believe this is true outside our sample of 1, but without believing this it would be basically impossible to study the cosmos, because we'd have no way to assess differing physics in distant locations, at least not until we are able to reach those locations and carry out experiments. Drugs are also the same with many, if not the majority of drugs having come from things that were initially intended to treat something else, only to find out what you created has stronger effects elsewhere. The most obvious and amusing one being that Viagra was meant to be a heart medicine. It turned out to have little effect on heart disease, but had a rather pronounced side effect in half the participants!
- jcranmer 2y agoThe island of stability should occur (indeed, does appear to occur, although we're still neutron-poor) in the elements of the low 110s.
- WorldMaker 2y agoThey thought they could predict it with high confidence a couple decades ago and then they learned more and confidence lowered again. That's kind of the nature of science, use what you know to find out what you don't know, and keep adjusting your models as you go. That's also something of the paradox at work at something like this: you sometimes can't have models that strongly predict interesting or "good" outcomes (such as the "island of stability") without a lot more data from experiments and maybe you aren't running the right experiments because you don't have the right model, but you won't have the right model until you run more experiments.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoScientific textbook publishers are salivating at a new element though
- Woshiwuja 2y agoChemistry is weird af. How does sodium (lethal) + clorine (lethal) = salt (yummy)
- sesm 2y agoBecause it's Cl- ions in salt vs Cl2 in gas.
- o11c 2y agoThat's literally the same as asking "how come hydrogen (flammable) + oxygen (enhances fire) = water (does not burn)?", but we probably have a better mental grasp of how water works.
- gruturo 2y agoOversimplifying, but you can explain that as "Because water is... the "ash" you get after burning hydrogen and oxygen."
- stergios 2y agoI think the intent is that water is a byproduct of combustion.
- withinboredom 2y agoI’m pretty sure the intent was that water is a byproduct of combustion.
- dexwiz 2y agoIt’s all about electrochemical potential. Adding or removing electrons from the outer shell of an atom involves a fair amount of energy, either being released or stored. Depending on the atom, they either want their shell filled or emptied. Noble gases have the same number of protons as a filled shell, so they are very stable. Why electron shells exist is a whole other matter. Water is kind of like ash. Technically full combustion of any hydrocarbon outputs CO2 and Water. Since water isn’t a greenhouse gas it’s not mentioned when discussing combustion usually.
- smcin 2y ago"Formerly known as Ununoctium (Uuo)"
- NoMoreNicksLeft 2y agoI propose we call it onetwentium. We might just skip to element 130 though, because onetwentiwunium is awkward to both spell and pronounce.
- Pet_Ant 2y agoI prefer "eka-radium" because it tells you that it's under "radium" in the table.
- jl6 2y agoOr shat-beryllium?
- pfdietz 2y agohttps://archive.ph/MqCpl https://archive.ph/MqCpl
- pfdietz 2y agoTL;DR: accelerating titanium ions to 0.1 c into a plutonium target made 2 atoms of Livermorium. The difficulty here is that such a collision leaves the result very "hot", so it tends to decompose. This tendency is minimized by reducing the energy of the incoming ion, but that reduces the rate of fusion. Needless to say, this doesn't present much in the way of practical benefit from producing some new science fictional material. It's purely of scientific interest.
- eichin 2y agoKey point I missed: Livermorium here is just a benchmark for the new titanium-beam process (having been discovered in 2000.) Actually using it to attempt to produce element 120 is a future step.
- pfdietz 2y agoYes; they had to demonstrate they could form and accelerate titanium beams (made difficult by the high temperature needed to sufficiently vaporize titanium.)
- eichin 2y agoHeh, the materials science side of particle physics is all sorts of fun: accelerate the particles to 10% of the speed of light - no big deal, but actually vaporizing them in the first place...
- ForOldHack 2y agoPita is relative. Getting Ti to oxidize? Easy - getting it got enough to strip the oxigen off? Very hard, and about 1000x harder than just oxidize, getting it into a pure plasma? Now this is where it just gets insane. Then beyond insane is accelerating individual atoms. ( Pretty much they just issue you a PhD. ) Then get it to .1c speed? Pretty much everyone you will talk to on a daily basis either has a Noble, or is goimg to get one, in a place where the building is named after one laureat, the parking lot is named for another, the room another, and the drinking fountain another. I have stood there, and it's pretty intimidating. A handful of the very top top people in the world. I guess it could be fun for some...I would use the verb... Plasmatize. The discovery of Fluorine...elemental, killed 8 and rendered 3 disabled. I have been following this for 40 years. Congratulations on the attempt.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoI’m a little disappointed the article didn’t talk about why they are skipping 119.
- lightedman 2y agoIt still hasn't been synthesized, as far as we know of. Not even a single atom.
- madcaptenor 2y agoThere are Reasons why even-numbered elements are slightly more stable (although frankly I don't understand them). If you look at the recent timeline (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_chemical_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_chemical_elements) 112, 114, 116, 118 were all discovered before 113, 115, 117.
- munificent 2y agoI'm not enough of a physicist to understand the article, but this Wikipedia page talks about why even numbers of protons and neutrons are more stable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even_and_odd_atomic_nuclei https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Even_and_odd_atomic_nuclei
- ssijak 2y agoHypothetically, is it possible that periodic table is infinite, its just too hard to create other elements?
- mglz 2y agoHard to create and the results seem to get more and more unstable, making it very hard to do any science on them. However there is a theorized "island of stability", where superheavy elements might stick around for a bit longer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
- delecti 2y agoThat theorized island is centered around elements we've already discovered though, being in the range of ~110 protons. So element 120, being discussed, is already well past that point.
- seanw444 2y agoWhy couldn't there be multiple islands of stability, and why couldn't they be way higher in proton count? All you should really need is a fairly "balanced" nucleus, right? Is there some property of larger nuclei that makes them increasingly more difficult to balance?
- mannykannot 2y agoI just posted some notes on this in another reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41057818
- adrian_b 2y agoThere are with certainty multiple islands of stability, when each layer of nucleons becomes complete. However, in each island of stability the most stable element is much less stable than the most stable element of the previous island of stability. Therefore in most higher islands of stability the decay times will become too short. It is possible and rather likely that only the first undiscovered island of stability may contain relatively long-lived elements, e.g. with half-lives over one second. An island of stability finishes at bismuth, which is radioactive, but which has a huge half-life. The next island of stability contains the long-lived thorium and uranium and the still relatively long-lived neptunium and plutonium, after which the half-lives decrease very quickly. Whichever will be the longest-lived elements of the next island of stability, their half-lives will be many orders of magnitude smaller than those of thorium and uranium.
- HPsquared 2y agoIt's all about stability. If you try and jam too many protons and neutrons together, they won't stay together for long. If the nucleus disintegrates before there's time for electrons to form and act like a chemical element, it's not really in the realm of chemistry any more. "IUPAC defines an element to exist if its lifetime is longer than 10^−14 second, which is the time it takes for the atom to form an electron cloud.[7]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheavy_element https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheavy_element (Edit: this was intended in response to ssijak's question about the theoretical limits)
- mensetmanusman 2y agoI hope the universe lets us upgrade the periodic table once we reach 120. Maybe we earn a new alpha constant that enables a whole new level of new elements for long distance space travel.
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- tomcam 2y agoIt’s answers like this that may hacker News one of the best places ever
- adrianN 2y agoIf you jam a lot of protons and neutrons together they become stable thanks to gravity. I wonder where the crossover point is.
- stouset 2y agoAh yes, good ol’ element unnil^{54}ium, a proton star. That would make a great “Things I Won’t Work With” entry for Derek Lowe.
- LeifCarrotson 2y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but aren't nuclear-density collapsed matter stars exclusively zero-net-charge neutron stars? I suppose you could instantiate an "oops all protons" neutron star with a charge of 10^54 coulombs in Universe Sandbox, but I struggle to imagine how that would come to or continue to exist physically. More importantly, I think that the Coulomb's Law repulsion effect would more than cancel out the gravitational attraction effect - both laws work as Force = (constant x particle1 x particle2) / distance^2, and the electromagnetic force is much, much stronger than gravity at all distances.
- charlie0 2y agoSpecifically, is there anything that can be done with this element in the real world that would otherwise be impossible?
- Pet_Ant 2y agoThese elements will never exist in any number for any meaningful amount of time for the human scale. That said, these extreme elements are great tests of the understanding of mechanics of atomic nuclei. Personally, I expect this improved understanding to become important in nanofabrication/nanotechnology as we are getting individual atoms to stick to each other. There are other implications I'm sure for those studying the early superhot universe. There is also the chance this is a stepping stone to the Island of Stability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
- retrac 2y agoWe have no idea because we don't know the properties of super-heavy elements. There is some conjecture from theory about an "island of stability" where super-dense elements above 118 become more stable, with half-lives in human terms like many seconds (rather than microseconds or nanoseconds). If so it would open all sorts of doors for physics and chemistry experiments on super heavy elements we can't do today because they disappear too quickly. It has even been suggested that these elements are effectively stable and account for some of what we call dark matter. (That one is unlikely.). Though really the chances are that such elements destroy themselves so quickly they can't be usefully examined.
- daedrdev 2y agoSome of the longer lived of the manufactured elements have medical uses. There's a chance the elements in the island of stability might have interesting properties
- news_to_me 2y agoFor some background on the quest to discover new elements, I highly recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe5WT22-AO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qe5WT22-AO8. The main story about Ninov's fraud is pretty interesting, but the beginning does a good overview of the recent history.
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- excalibur 2y agoHere's hoping the person who winds up with the naming rights is a proper nerd. I want it to be called something fun, like vibranium, adamantium, or midichlorium.
- gosub100 2y agoI hope they patent it, just to draw attention to the absurdity of IP law.
- nayuki 2y agoI hope they use said patent to sue supernovas for creating element 120 without license
- mrguyorama 2y agoNew elements are named by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPAC/IUPAP_Joint_Working_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IUPAC/IUPAP_Joint_Working_Part... They typically try to honor someone or something relevant to particle physics or nuclear physics. So, no fun allowed, unless you are a physicist in which case you probably find naming things after historical physics figures fun.
- NeoTar 2y agoI’m a physicist (completely unrelated field though), but I want to name it after Ytterby in Sweden so rather than having four elements named after one town, we now have five… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lGe5jgZgI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lGe5jgZgI
- xyst 2y agowhat are the applications for these new elements? more destructive atomic bomb? any medical applications? besides learning about them briefly in chem classes as the "man made elements", haven't heard much from them otherwise
- curiouscavalier 2y agoBeen a while since I was in this area, so I may be off base. But my knee jerk thought on Ubn is getting another valuable data point on nuclear structure. We’ve got a magic number at Z=82 and one at N=126. Do we get it one at higher Z? This doesn’t answer it directly, but it’s a step along the path. And at the very least is a great data point for confirming/constraining various structure models.
- lordgrenville 2y agoGenuinely interesting comment, but not really an answer to OP's request for applications.
- empath75 2y agoThere are some predicted islands of stability at various points further out in the periodic table: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-quest-for-superheavy-elements-and-the-island-of-stability/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-quest-for-sup...
- zamadatix 2y agoGenerally these newer elements themselves aren't directly applicable to day to day objects or tools given the difficulty in creating even individual atoms and the short life of said atoms. It's almost completely about advancing the general atomic and subatomic understanding by pressing at the edges.
- odo1242 2y agoDang, just one away from discovering the g block!
- odo1242 2y agoContext: The periodic table currently can be arranged into four "blocks": the S block (first two columns), the P block (last six columns, excluding Helium), the D block (transition metals, in the center), and the F block (under the periodic table). The 121st element would end up in the G block, which isn't in any of these locations but rather gets its own special location.
- puzzledobserver 2y agoWhile we hear a lot about isotopes (nuclei with same proton count but different neutron count), we don't hear as much about nuclear isomers (nuclei with the same proton count and same neutron count, but somehow having different configurations). 1. Are nuclear isomers a thing? 2. Corollary: Could it be the case that some nuclei are stable and others are unstable, even though they have the same numbers of protons and neutrons?
- Denvercoder9 2y agoThe answer to both your questions is yes. Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_isomer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_isomer
- buggythebug 2y agoAs of my comment there were 120 comments :)
- ggm 2y agoAre there even transitionally stable conditions in other places in the universe where these elements exist for more than fleeting time? I would imagine in conditions of high heat, plasma, RF energy and pressure many things "exist" but I don't see that as quite the same. I guess if their spectral line emissions from stars says they are a continuum of existence then thats something, but I wondered if there were wierd islands of stability e.g. inside crystal lattices under pressure, or in solution in some wierd, non-plasma state. Absent an observer round that star we can't know but can we hypotheise physical states which would let it be?
- indoordin0saur 2y agoNeutron stars are made of a solar mass of neutrons and protons packed so tightly together that they're almost like a single giant nucleus. They can collide and shatter into countless particles of every imaginable heavy element. Of course most of these quickly decay but they decay into other heavier things that are more stable. This is possibly where heavy elements in our solar system such as uranium, platinum and gold came from. If we could visit Earth shortly after its formation 4.5 billion years ago maybe we'd see trace amounts of even more exotic elements! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star_merger#Distribution_of_Heavy_Metals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_star_merger#Distributi...
- humanfromearth9 2y agoWouldn't it be better if they tried to make gold?
- dexwiz 2y agoWe can already make gold in a similar manner. It’s not cost effective.
- ted_dunning 2y agoNah.... several hundred atoms of gold isn't worth the effort.
- ur-whale 2y agoI have to ask: given the vanishingly small half-life of these elements (order of milliseconds) and tiny, tiny number of atoms produced ... what is the point of these experiments ? What can they possibly teach us ?
- im3w1l 2y agoYou never know where the next breakthrough will come from, but clearly some places are more likely and some less. In this case I guess something that could happen is that theories predict the element will last for say 1 femtosecond but experiments show it only lasts for 0.95 femtoseconds, and then the disparity helps shed light on quantum chromodynamics or something.
- dev1ycan 2y agoI know that it's speculated that there's another point in the periodic table much further down the line where another bunch of stable elements could exist
- southernplaces7 2y agoEvery time I read references to one of the transuranic elements, I can't help but want to share this absolutely delightful narrative about actually building a wall of bricks from each element in the periodic table. Hilarious stuff. https://englishatlc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/randall-munroe-periodic-wall-of-elements.pdf https://englishatlc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/randall-m...
- ebjjbsd 2y ago[dead]