Four new, unnamed elements have been added to the table and completed its seventh row. Now you can mumble through parts of your favorite periodic table songs just like you do with other songs! (Since you couldn’t before, because you had the whole thing memorized, right?)
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) has announced that elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 have met the qualifications to be considered officially “discovered,” which means they can be added to the periodic table. We’ve known that 115 and 117, at least, have been on the way to joining the table for some time, and now that they’re official and their row is complete, scientists are off to explore new, uncharted territory.
The man-made elements were synthesized and confirmed by a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (115, 117, and 118) and Riken institute in Japan (113). They’ll be named over the coming months, with 113 to be the first element named by scientists in Asia.
In the IUPAC announcement,Professor Jan Reedijk, President of the Inorganic Chemistry Division of IUPAC, said,
The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row. IUPAC has now initiated the process of formalizing names and symbols for these elements temporarily named as ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).
But even with this new sense of completion, the scientific community must, of course, press on. The team at Riken will continue to “look to the uncharted territory of element 119 and beyond,” according to a statement from Kosuke Morita, who was the head of research for element 113.
(via The Verge, image via Larry on Flickr)
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