The 7throw of the periodic table in Chemistry has been completed recently after 4 new elements have been added after their discovery by scientists in Japan, Russia and America.
According to AP reports, a team of Japanese scientists has met the criteria for naming a new element, the synthetic highly radioactive element 113. Kosuke Morita, who was leading the research at the government-affiliated Riken Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, was notified of the decision on December 31, 2015 by the US-based International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). “Now that we have conclusively demonstrated the existence of element 113, we plan to look to the uncharted territory of element 119 and beyond,” Morita said in a statement.
A joint working group of the IUPAC and International Union of Pure and Applied Physics also announced decisions on the recognition of discoveries of elements 115, 117 and 118.
RyojiNoyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry said: “To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal”.
The elements, which currently bear placeholder names, will be officially named by the teams that discovered them in the coming months. Element 113 will be the first element to be named in Asia.
Element 113 sits between Copernicium and Flerovium on the periodic table. Isotopes of element 113 have a very short half-life, lasting for less than a thousandth of a second, making its discovery very difficult.
“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.
By: Archa Dave
