Scientists in California and Russia announced Monday that they had created the heaviest atomic element ever made, adding a new item to the menu of matter known as the periodic table and revealing fresh secrets about the nature of atoms.
The new, radioactive element – which has not yet been formally named but is being referred to as ununoctium (Latin for one-one-eight), ekaradon (“beneath radon on the periodic table”) or simply “element 118” – did not linger long.
Like most “super-heavy” elements – which are not known to exist in nature but have been synthesized by slamming smaller atoms together – the three atoms came and went in about nine ten-thousandths of a second each in a lab on Russia’s Volga River.
While practical applications for such fleeting phenomena are difficult to envision, experts said they were confident some would appear – especially if researchers can leverage the findings to make even larger atomic constructs that might have lifetimes of minutes, months or longer.
“One never knows what the application of the things you find may be,” said Darleane Hoffman, a professor of chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, tossing out the example of plutonium-239, the key fissile ingredient in atomic bombs, first created in 1941.
The last new element to be confirmed was number 111, roentgenium, discovered in 1994.
The report on element 118 was published in the October issue of the journal Physical Review C.
