Scientists Welcome Two New Elements to the Periodic Table - You may have grown up thinking you knew what was what in science, back when Pluto was a planet, the opposite sex had cooties, and the last 10% of every beverage was known to be backwash. But things change, including the periodic table, which just made two new elements official.
Sadly, they don't have names yet, according to the AP. So for now, we'll just have to call them #114 and #116 (numbers which refer to the number of protons in their nuclei and which give them their unique boxes on the table). We know that they last for less than a second, and that "the new elements were made by slamming two lighter elements together in the hopes that they'd stick."
Elements are sometimes listed before they're voted into the table, as was the case with #114 and #116 before an international committee of scientists gave them the go-ahead, and as is currently the case with #113 and #115, who continue to languish in periodic table purgatory. The total number of officially recognized elements, a Carnegie Mellon professor told the AP, is now 114, given this condition. He also noted that over the last 250 years, elements have been added every two-and-a-half years on average. Which all goes to show, saying "It's science," might not be as definitive a statement of truth as you thought.
A Brief History of the Periodic Table
Six atoms may seem minuscule--especially if they exist for only fractions of a second--but they can have huge implications. The recent announcement that Russian and American scientists finally managed to produce a tiny bit of element 117 by firing calcium atoms (element 20) at berkelium (element 97) fills in a missing spot on the periodic table. When the results are confirmed, "ununseptium" will get a catchier moniker and occupy the square between 116 and 118--elements that also await proper names from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
We've come a long way from the classical list of earth, wind, water and fire. Modern elements, with all their complexities, require a chart whose rows and columns reflect their properties and how they interact with one another. In the 19th century, several scientists worked on developing a periodic table that arranged the elements according to their atomic weight. It is Russian chemistry professor Dmitri Mendeleev, however, who is credited with developing the first real table in 1869. He organized the 63 then known elements into groups with similar properties and left some spaces blank for those whose existence he could not yet prove. In 1913 physicist Henry Moseley's experiments showed definitively that the order was dependent not on atomic weight but on atomic number--the number of protons in an atom's nucleus.
Like most of those after uranium (element 92), "ununseptium" is artificially made. This latest find supports the idea that as-yet-undiscovered stable elements exist, but no one knows for sure if there is an end point to the table or if additional artificially engineered elements will expand it even further. The question of how much bigger the 141-year-old chart can get is anything but elementary. ( time.com )
Sadly, they don't have names yet, according to the AP. So for now, we'll just have to call them #114 and #116 (numbers which refer to the number of protons in their nuclei and which give them their unique boxes on the table). We know that they last for less than a second, and that "the new elements were made by slamming two lighter elements together in the hopes that they'd stick."
Elements are sometimes listed before they're voted into the table, as was the case with #114 and #116 before an international committee of scientists gave them the go-ahead, and as is currently the case with #113 and #115, who continue to languish in periodic table purgatory. The total number of officially recognized elements, a Carnegie Mellon professor told the AP, is now 114, given this condition. He also noted that over the last 250 years, elements have been added every two-and-a-half years on average. Which all goes to show, saying "It's science," might not be as definitive a statement of truth as you thought.
A Brief History of the Periodic Table
Six atoms may seem minuscule--especially if they exist for only fractions of a second--but they can have huge implications. The recent announcement that Russian and American scientists finally managed to produce a tiny bit of element 117 by firing calcium atoms (element 20) at berkelium (element 97) fills in a missing spot on the periodic table. When the results are confirmed, "ununseptium" will get a catchier moniker and occupy the square between 116 and 118--elements that also await proper names from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
We've come a long way from the classical list of earth, wind, water and fire. Modern elements, with all their complexities, require a chart whose rows and columns reflect their properties and how they interact with one another. In the 19th century, several scientists worked on developing a periodic table that arranged the elements according to their atomic weight. It is Russian chemistry professor Dmitri Mendeleev, however, who is credited with developing the first real table in 1869. He organized the 63 then known elements into groups with similar properties and left some spaces blank for those whose existence he could not yet prove. In 1913 physicist Henry Moseley's experiments showed definitively that the order was dependent not on atomic weight but on atomic number--the number of protons in an atom's nucleus.
Like most of those after uranium (element 92), "ununseptium" is artificially made. This latest find supports the idea that as-yet-undiscovered stable elements exist, but no one knows for sure if there is an end point to the table or if additional artificially engineered elements will expand it even further. The question of how much bigger the 141-year-old chart can get is anything but elementary. ( time.com )
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