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Consider your Chemistry textbook officially out of date – four new elements are set to be added to the periodic table.
According to CNN, “elements 113, 115, 117 and 118 have formally been recognized by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the U.S.-based world authority on chemistry.” The announcement was made December 30th and means that the seventh row of the table is finally complete.
Elements 115, 117 and 118 came from a Russian-American team at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, while Japanese researchers were credited for 113.
None of the elements were found in nature, but instead created in a laboratory. According to CNN, “the elements had temporary names and symbols on the periodic table as their existence was hard to prove. Since they decay extremely quickly, scientists found it difficult to reproduce them more than once.”
“The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row,” said Jan Reedijk, president of the Inorganic Chemistry Division of IUPAC, in a recent statement.
He continues, “IUPAC has now initiated the process of formalizing names and symbols for these elements temporarily named as ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118).”
The periodic table was originally devised by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869 to categorize chemical elements by atomic number. It was also the bane of my existence in eleventh grade Chemistry.
The table has not been updated since 2011, when elements 114 (Flerovium) and 116 (Livermorium) were added to the family.
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New Elements Added to Periodic Table
Ununtrium, Uut
A chemical element with atomic number 113. While the name and symbol are currently temporary, it is a synthetic element and is extremely radioactive. Its most stable known isotope, ununtrium-286, has a half-life of 20 seconds.
Ununseptium, Uus
A superheavy artificial chemical element with an atomic number of 117 and a temporary symbol of Uus. Also known as eka-astatine, it is the second-heaviest known element and penultimate element of the 7th period of the periodic table.
Ununpentium,Uup
A synthetic superheavy element with the temporary atomic number 115. It is extremely radioactive. Its most stable known isotope, ununpentium-289, has a half-life of only 220 milliseconds.
Ununoctium, Uuo
UPAC’s temporary name for the transactinide element with the atomic number 118. It has the highest atomic number and highest atomic mass of all the elements discovered so far.
According to the IUPAC, new elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.
It will take five months for the organization to make a final decision on official names. They will be open for public review shortly after they are submitted.
