Ununseptium - Periodic Table’s 117th Element Element 117, otherwise known as ununseptium, was discovered in 2010 by a group of American and Russian physicists with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. It has, however, taken four years before another group of researchers, including those from India, were able to recreate the atoms of the said element. Now, with the approval from the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), Element 117 can be named and added to the periodic table of elements. The newest instance of Element 117 was created by a team from GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Germany. In their findings published in Physical Review Letters, the researchers said they managed to create the element by firing Calcium isotopes at radioactive Berkelium. Making Element 117 is at the absolute boundary of what is possible right now, said Professor David Hinde of the Australian National University, according to The Verge. The research team was composed of more than 70 scientists and engineers from over a dozen institutions in Australia, Finland, Germany, India, Japan, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Elements that come after atomic number 104 are called super heavy elements, and the long-lived ones have a nuclei with extremely long half-lives. Element 117, while still highly unstable like other transuranium elements, has a brief half-life of about 80 milliseconds, which researchers said is still longer than expected. Super heavy elements have yet to be found in nature, and can only be produced at the moment by accelerating beams of nuclei and shooting them at the heaviest target nuclei, researchers said. When the two nuclei are fused together, they occasionally produce a super heavy element, but the chances are highly unlikely and those that are accessible today can only exist for a very short time. The successful experiments on element 117 are an important step on the path to the production and detection of elements situated on the island of stability of super-heavy elements, said Professor Horst Stocker, scientific director of GSI.
Posted on: Mon, 05 May 2014 15:34:49 +0000
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