Periodic Table and New Elements

 Posted by Qianhui Hua

Every field of science has its favorite anniversary.  For chemistry, there is no reason tobe celebrated beyond the origin of the periodic table. The periodic table of the elements was created 150 years ago by the Russian chemist Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev.

Chemistry students have become more and more familiar with the periodic table. It enumerates the elements that make up all the earth's materials and arranges them to reveal the laws of their properties, thereby guiding the development of chemical research in theory and practice. But the periodic table of elements is not immutable. In 2016, four new elements officially became full members. I searched and understood how the periodic table gets new elements. 

Each element on the periodic table has a different number of protons. Therefore, chemists look for two known elements that they can crush together to create new elements. So far, the element with the highest atomic number discovered by humans is element 118.

To make oganesson, element 118, chemists used 20 protons of Ca and 98 protons of Cf.  A beam of ions of one element is shot at atoms of the other element. With luck, the two fuse, forming the new element. But often they don’t. And even when they do, the new element are often unstable. They can decay in mere milliseconds.

I am also very interested in its naming. These names were determined by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). Anyway, the IUPAC says that elements have to be named after one of five things: a scientist, a place, a mineral or substance, a descriptor of the element, or a mythological reference. Of the new elements, three are named after places and one is named after a person.
For these 4 new elements, nihonium (element 113), the name is based on the Japanese word Nippon, which is one word for Japan itself—where the element was discovered—and means “Land of the Rising Sun”. Moscovium (115), named after Moscow. Tennessine (117), named after Tennessee. Researchers at Vanderbilt University and University of Tennessee teamed up to discover this one in 2010, making it the most recently synthesized element. It’s also just the second element to be named after a U.S. state, the first being californium. Oganesson(118) is named after Yuri Oganessian, a Russian nuclear physicist.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/physics-periodic-table-future-superheavy-elements 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/physics-chemistry-how-periodic-table-gets-new-elements