The new elements, being provisionally called Uut, Uup, Uus, and Uuo, will occupy the positions 113, 115, 117 and 118 of the Periodic Table. The discovery, which was announced by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, is the first since 2011 - when the elements 114 (flerovium) and 116 (livermorium) were added.
Element 113 was discovered by scientists at the Riken Institute in Japan, while 115, 117 and 118 were born of a collaboration between the Russian and US laboratories. In the coming months, teams will choose the official names of each element, which will pay tribute to a country, a mineral, a mythological aspect, a property or a person. Two examples are einsteinium (element 99), discovered in 1952 and named after Albert Einstein and Mendelevium (element 101), which was discovered in 1955 and named after the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev.
The discoverers of new elements have not yet decided on their name preferences. But the team of Japanese scientists had already suggested some years ago that a possible name for the 113 would be "Japanium".
The new elements are synthetic, namely, were produced in the laboratory. The scientists used particle accelerators to collide atoms of other chemical elements, and thus reach new. They do not exist in nature and in the laboratory last fractions of a second before turning into lighter elements. Ie have no immediate practical usefulness. can not be used to build things, for example. They are a consequence of baseline scientific research that seeks to better understand the nature and behavior of atomic nuclei. And a great discovery.
"For a scientist, this is more than winning an Olympic gold medal," Ryoji Noyori set, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the British newspaper Guardian. But researchers do not want to stay there. "Now we want to look ahead, go in search of the element 119 and other beyond it," said Kosuke Morita, leader of the team that produced the 113.
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