Skip to Content

Seventh row of periodic table completed

Four new elements have been officially added to the periodic table, finally rounding out the table’s seventh row. The elements were discovered by scientists in Japan, Russia, and the United States and are the first to be added to the table since 2011, when elements 114 and 116 were added.

The four new elements were verified on December 30 by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The IUPAC is the global organization that governs chemical nomenclature, terminology, and measurement.

 

IUPAC announced that a Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California produced sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of new elements 115, 117 and 118.

IUPAC awarded credit for element 113’s discovery to a team of scientists from the Riken institute in Japan, though credit had also been claimed by the Russians as well as the Americans.

Lead researcher at Riken Kosuke Morita said his team now plans to “look to the unchartered territory of element 119 and beyond.”

Former Riken president and Nobel laureate for chemistry Ryoji Noyori said: “To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal”.

The elements currently bear placeholder names, but will be officially named by the teams that are credited with discovering them in the coming months, as science textbook manufacturers sigh and wait. Element 113 will be the first element to be named in Asia.

 

“IUPAC has now initiated the process of formalising 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).”

New elements can be named after a mythological concept, a mineral, a place or country, a property or a scientist.

All four of the new elements were discovered by slamming lighter nuclei into each other and tracking the following decay of the radioactive superheavy elements. They are all synthetic.

These only exist for fractions of a second before decaying into other elements.