Element 117 and the Island of Stability
A team of US and Russian scientists have been beavering away in their lab to create element 117.
This new superheavy element hints at the much-suspected 'island of stability' on the periodic table.
Created by bombarding berkelium with calcium ions (I won't get into the chemistry!), the SIX atoms of 117
The island of stability is a term in nuclear physics that refers to the possible existence of a region beyond the current periodic table where new superheavy elements with special numbers of neutrons and protons would exhibit increased stability.
Such an island would extend the periodic table to even heavier elements and support longer isotopic lifetimes to enable chemistry experiments.
Element 117 - called Ununseptium - was the only missing element in row seven of the periodic table.
On course to the island of stability, researchers initially skipped element 117 due to the difficulty in obtaining the berkelium target material.
The observed decay patterns in the new isotopes from this experiment, as close as researchers have ever approached the island of stability, continue a general trend of increasing stability for superheavy elements with increasing numbers of neutrons in the nucleus
This provides strong evidence for the existence of the island of stability just somewhere out of our reach at the moment.
What we do when we get there is another question I haven't the answer for!
Just as an aside, 26 new elements beyond uranium have been added to the periodic table since 1940.
Weird Science Factoid: The first person to go over Niagra Falls in a barrel was Anna Edson Taylor in 1901. She survived!
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
