German nouns...
You've just got to love them. The scientific ones are the best (although I must say they're the only ones I know).
Move over, Roentgenium. There's a new super-heavy chemical element joining the periodic table. The yet-to-be-named "element 112" has been officially recognized by the table's governing body, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. A team of scientists, lead by Sigurd Hofmann at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für …
I thought that heavy elements were now just named after the latin for their number?
Didn't this get decided after a bunch of competing countries in the 80s ended up with names like, ReaganWillCrushthe EvilEmpire-ium and GloriousRevolutionTractorFactory-ium for the same element.
My periodic table already has element 112 on it. And elements 113, 114, 115 and 116. Strangely no 117, but there is 118 there. That is all discovered elements when it was printed. Since all those elements are known and they still haven't got around to naming it why is this news all of a sudden? IUPAC have suddenly decided that it is an element when that fact was not in dispute anyway?
With shit Chemists are not going to be able to do anything useful with. Like move this human invented crap over to some other section and bury it there for the Physicists.
FUCK LIKE, OH THERE! THERE'S ONE!!!!! ALKYLATE IT WITH THAT KETONE AND SEPARATE THE OPTICALLY ACTIVE FORM WITH........ ARGHHHHHHHHHH ITS DECAYED WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU????? OBVIOUSLY NOT FUCKING HERE! FUCKING CHEMIST! FUCK, WHAT'S THE FUCKING POINT?
'Since all those elements are known and they still haven't got around to naming it why is this news all of a sudden? IUPAC have suddenly decided that it is an element when that fact was not in dispute anyway?'
Although the element was actually synthesised in 1996 and repeated in 2000; the results of the decay of the daughter isotope were incompatible with one another. A third experiment in 2004 confirmed the original experiment; since then its been a matter of straightening things out the decay series.
***
'So it's possible to create a new element in laboratory conditions with a miniscule life expectancy. And it gets an entry in the periodic table? It seems outrageously artificial.'
Depends what you mean by 'artificial'; if you mean this element could never naturally exist at any time in any place in the Universe, then it is clearly natural. If you mean 'never observed on Earth before now' then it is artificial.
Nuclear boffins have models for the nuclei of atoms which suggest that superheavy elements way beyond the current periodic table might be much more stable than other 'manmade' elements with half lives that could be hours, days, years or even geological periods. So it's a long slog looking for the Island of Stability which may or may not exist.
Well one possible reason might be research into new calming drugs, which might take your reaction down a notch or two...
How would it "mess it up" exactly? It's another addition to the table. Like adding another street to your town doesn't "mess up" your map, you just eventually need an updated one. Or adding to any body of knowledge. So physicists have created a new element---now they can see if the resulting properties jibe with what was predicted, and learn more about physical reality. Advances of this sort are what made possible the transistor, the computer you're typing on, the Global Positioning System, and countless others. How many things in history were discovered or invented, that at the time, no one knew what to do with them and deemed them useless? You're contributing your comment to an IT site---I'd figure you would realize these things.
Yes, the pseudo-latin forms are just placeholders until an element is confirmed by the IUPAC, Inebriated Ununderstandable Peoples Association of Chemistry... or something like that. In short that means that previously it was known as ununbium when it was discovered... in 1996! and the group just now sobered up enough to bless the four poor atoms... whatever that means.
Wasteofeffortium, Nouseium, Nowyouseeitnowyoudontium.
If the smallest unit of time that could be measured was Planck time, around 5.3912 x 10^-44 seconds then I would hazard a guess that every element in the periodic table could be collided with any other to create a new element and it's existence noted. Not to mention colliding all those newly created elements to create yet more, providing of course they could be impacted with sufficient energy to overcome electrostatic repulsion to the point where the nuclear force takes over.
"Hofmann and his team first synthesized the element in 1996 by firing charged zinc atoms through a 120 meter-long particle accelerator into a lead target. The zinc and lead nuclei were fused to form the new element."
WOW! They were doing alchemy! They were trying to make gold out of Lead!!! Seriously, why else would you accelerate Zinc atoms at Lead. The fact thet they actually managed to change atomic weight at all suggests that if they get the right combination they just might manage it!!!!!!!!!!
Creating new elements is a bit like firing a cannonball at a brick wall. For a brief moment there is a joint state comprising bricks and cannonball. Then all the bits go their separate ways.
Technically, they were in a lower potential energy state while they were together due to their mutual gravitational attraction. So you could describe them as a transient wall-cannonball compound. But most of us would just call it something like a crunch.
So Crunchium it is then.
What you get if you fire Gallium at Lead: not enough neutrons.
Light elements have about the same number of protons as neutrons - adding an extra neutron means populating a higher energy level. A neutron can decay into a proton and an electron, the resulting proton can drop to a lower energy level and this more than compensates for the additional electrostatic repulsion of all those protons. Heavy elements need more neutrons: the protons repel each other with electrostatic forces, but all the protons and neutrons attract each nuclear forces. The extra neutrons hold the nucleus together and make it more stable.
The half life of 112 was so short because there were not enough neutrons to hold the nucleus together. If they had 173 neutrons instead of 165, the half life might have been several minutes (half life is estimated from trends - there is not enough (any?) direct physical data for very heavy elements). Using gallium instead of zinc adds a proton, but does not add any more neutrons, and 113 would be more stable with 174 neutrons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_ununbium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_ununtrium
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability
Making gold (number 79) out of lead (number 82) in this way is not possible. You could try a variation where you blast small lumps off from a lead nucleus and hope that you get gold left behind, that may work.
The value of any gold you manage to create would be tiny in comparison to the cost of the process of making it though. A much better way is to use a special process that I've developed which gives recoverable quantities of gold at a guaranteed profit. This process was perfected while I was at university in Nigeria. For a small investment, we can go into partnership with this process; please contact me to increase your wealth greatly and bring blessings on your family.
Actually, people did that years ago. Lead into gold is old-hat.
Lead into gold in a way that's vaguely economical- now THAT'S the problem. Same with creating diamonds from coal or generating petrol from dead stuff in less-than-geological terms- it's been done. But it's horrendously uneconomical so it's just a research project.
If it's the biggest element created, verified (and soon to be named) as of yet, how about Jumbonium? Obesinium?
Or given that it's expensive, can do far less than the other elements and will shortly be superseded by a later, more expensive, model how about iPhonium?
A neutron star is technically the biggest nucleus going, but it's held together by gravity rather than the strong force.
On a side note, the cannon ball-wall analogy is a little wrong; a fraction of a second is a LONG time as far as sub atomic reactions go. It's more akin to the rolling away with 1/2 a dozen bricks attached to it. This gives enough time for the nucleus to stabilize before it decays again. We can study it within this window (mostly by how exactly it falls apart again but...)
Cynar