The Periodic Table Has Four New Elements

It’s time to take down your lab posters and re-write The Element Song. The seventh row of the periodic table is finally complete following the verification of four “superheavy” chemical elements discovered by scientists in America, Japan and Russia.

The elements were verified on the 30th December by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), and are the first elements to be added to the periodic table since 2011. “The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row,” said Jan Reedijk, president of IUPAC’s inorganic chemistry division.

Gold medal discovery

IUPAC credits a team of Russian and American scientists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California with the discovery of three of the elements. Japanese scientists from the Riken institute have been credited with the discovery of the fourth. “To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal,” Ryoji Noyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry, told the Guardian.

The elements, which are man-made, were created by slamming two elements with light nuclei into each other, forming “superheavy” elements which only exist for a short time (fractions of a second) before decaying.

Dr Kosuke Morita, lead scientist in the Riken team, is looking forward to furthering his research: “Now that we have conclusively demonstrated the existence of element 113,” he said, “we plan to look to the uncharted territory of element 119 and beyond, aiming to examine the chemical properties of the elements in the seventh and eighth rows of the periodic table, and someday to discover the island of stability."

Temporary names have been allocated to the elements until the teams responsible for the discoveries suggest names for them. Until then, their placeholder names and symbols are: ununtrium (Uut, element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).

The scientists from the Riken institute will be the first researchers in Asia to name an element. They will have plenty of creative freedom because international rules permit new elements to be based on a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.

As you may know, there isn’t a universal analytical technique that can determine all of the whole periodic table in all type of samples, as discussed in this article - Overview of Most Commonly Used Analytical Techniques for Elemental Analysis. However, with the addition of four new elements is only going to make things more difficult!

Further reading

Two reports detailing the discoveries will be published later this year in the IUPAC journal, Pure and Applied Chemistry.

Image Credit - Flickr Creative Commons / David Mulder