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INVESTIGATIVE PHENOMENON: AUTHENTIC READING

Meet 115, the Newest Element on the

Periodic Table
The extremely heavy element was just confirmed by scientists in Sweden

by Melody Kramer

If you've learned all the elements from actinium to zirconium, it's time to head back to the
periodic table, where there's a new, extremely heavy element in town.

The new element doesn't have an official name yet, so scientists are calling it
ununpentium, based on the Latin and Greek words for its atomic number, 115.

In case you forgot your high school chemistry, here's a quick refresher: An element's atomic
number is the number of protons it contains in its nucleus.

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The heaviest element in nature is uranium, which has 92 protons. But heavier elements­which
have more protons in their nucleus­can be created through nuclear fusion.

The man­made 115 was first created by Russian scientists in Dubna about ten years ago. This
week, chemists at Lund University in Sweden announced that they had replicated the Russian
study at the GSI Helmholtz Center for Heavy Ion Research in Germany.

Element 115 will join its neighbors 114 and 116­flerovium and livermorium, respectively­on the
periodic table just as soon as a committee from the International Union of Pure and Applied
Chemistry (IUPAC) decides on an official name for 115.

We asked Paul Hooker, a chemistry professor at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah,
for his take on the latest addition to the periodic table.

So it sounds like 115 was actually created ten years ago, by a lab in Russia. Why are we
just learning about its discovery?

When you find a new element, it has to be confirmed. You need two different labs to confirm it
before [IUPAC] considers adding it to the periodic table.

This is the second lab coming in and repeating the same experiment, so now it's considered to
be an official new element.

So what did the Russian and Swedish chemists actually do?

The way that you make new elements now is by shooting a beam of an element at another
element and then seeing what happens when they collide.

In this case, the researchers used americium, which is kind of interesting because it's an
unstable, radioactive element. They fired calcium atoms­which are much lighter than americium
atoms­at the americium for weeks or even months. Most of the calcium atoms bounced off, but
every now and then the atoms collided and instead of the calcium element bouncing off, it
actually stuck to the americium element. When that happens, you get a short­lived atom with
more protons in its nucleus, which is the center of the new element 115.

How did they know they created a new element if it happened so quickly? I think I read
that it existed for less than a second before it decayed.

They look for the decay products. They look for telltale signs for when 115 disintegrates, by
what's called alpha particle emission. When they see enough of those signals, they can say they
probably formed a new element.

How do they know if a new element will be unstable or not?

There was an element 118 that was predicted to be much more stable; 115 wasn't predicted to
be especially stable. We know what is stable. Certain ratios of protons to neutrons are stable.

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As the nucleus gets bigger and bigger, it's not stable­and then it can radioactively decay and spit
out smaller particles­that means it's really not very stable.

Can anyone try to create a new element?

No. You need a large vacuum chamber because you can't fire calcium atoms through the air.
You need a lot of specialized equipment. There aren't many labs that can do this type of thing.
The only people interested in doing this are trying to answer some of the bigger questions, like
"How is all matter held together?"

Where are most new elements created?

Most of these new elements have been formed in Russia and the States for the past 30 to 40
years. It's become a race for who can get the next new element, to try to make the biggest one
you actually can. But of course, because they're so big, they're very unstable and fall apart
extremely quickly.

If they fall apart extremely quickly­and clearly don't exist in nature­then what's the point?

I talk about this a lot with my students. I basically tell them, "Because it's there." There's no way
that a new, unstable element is going to have any uses because it deteriorates so quickly. But it
gives insight about the forces that hold atoms together so we can learn more about how the
universe is held together.

Why are people really doing this? Why do we send particles through huge colliders? Why are
we smashing things into each other at higher and higher velocities? I think it fulfills the human
race's natural curiosity. We want to know where we come from. And every time we answer
something, we come up with ten more questions to answer.

This was a man­made element. How do we know we've found all of the naturally
occurring elements?

The good thing with elements is that they're defined by atomic numbers, meaning they're
defined by the number of protons in the nucleus. This number is never a fraction, so you can't
have, say, 3.2 protons in a nucleus. So we know we have them all because we know of an
element with one proton and an element with two protons and so on.

Is there a limit to how many elements we can create?

Well, we're hitting a limit with stability when there are over 90 protons in a nucleus, so while we
may find more, we're certainly not getting up to 1,000 protons. It would be too unstable.

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One last question: I actually have a periodic table shower curtain. Do you recommend
getting an updated one?

I recommend updating your shower curtain when 115 is confirmed. When the committee gets
together and names it. And that's an entirely different question.

Credits
Text: Meet 115, the Newest Element on the Periodic Table: The extremely heavy element was just confirmed by
scientists in Sweden by Melody Kramer. Copyright © National Geographic. Reprinted with permission.

Photography: Humdan Maseng/Alamy Stock Vector

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