New Element Created

SLAM! In these artist's renderings, a speeding calcium-48 ion bears down on a larger americium-243 atom, photo from www.phschool.com

CNN news: October 17, 2006


Russia and the United States announced that they have created a new super-heavy element, atomic number 118.

Scientists said they smashed together calcium with the manmade element Californium to make an atom with 118 protons in its nucleus. The new element lasted for just one millisecond, but it was the heaviest element ever made and the first manmade inert gas -- the atomic family that includes helium, neon and radon.

If confirmed, the still-unnamed element would be placed beneath radon on the periodic table of elements, said Ken Moody of the Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, which was joined on the project by Russia's Joint Institute of Nuclear Research.

In 1999, scientists said they created element 118, only to withdraw their claims in 2002 amid charges of falsified data and the firing of a scientist. That group of researchers included three from the team that announced Monday's discovery.

Let us hope this one is really for real.

Creating a new element "is sort of the Holy Grail of nuclear physics," said Konrad Gelbke, a scientist who was not on the team but directs the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University. "It's extremely hard to do."
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