It's All About the Ununpentium 411
spitefulcrow writes "The New York Times is reporting that elements 113 and 115 have been created by a joint team of Russian and American scientists. The temporary names are ununtrium and ununpentium until the experiment has been duplicated and verified in another lab. According to the article, speculation has been made that 'Rather than being round, nuclei in that region and beyond could contain bubbles and have strange doughnut-like shapes'."
Google Link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ooooh..me first (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Element 114 (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.webelements.com/ [webelements.com]
Re:Element 114 (Score:5, Informative)
(e6003 - chemist and part-time geek).
Re:Element 114 (Score:3, Informative)
is it the pursuit of the correct combination that is so hard? Or is it just minor alterations to existing elements?
It's a matter of accelerating atoms of one element towards another, in the hope that they collide and fuse. In this case, calcium (20) + americium (95) = ununpentium (115). Then, that decays, losing two protons, and becomes 113.
Does element 114 already exist?
According to this [google.com], yes.
Re:What's the point ? (Score:5, Informative)
Not the first doughnut element (Score:2, Informative)
Re:About the *stupid* name... (Score:4, Informative)
Not quite. Essentially, it's a name made up out of the digits that make the number. So, 1 is 'un', two is 'bi', three 'tri', four 'quad' five 'pent', six 'hex', seven 'sept', eight 'oct', and nine I can't remember; it's probably 'non'. Then you stick 'ium' on the end, because all element names have to end in 'ium'. Stick '115' in there, and you get ununpentium. The resemblance to the Intel chip is (almost) pure coincidence.
Re:About the *stupid* name... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sorry, couldn't resist... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Science Today (Score:2, Informative)
Conspiracy website already reported this years ago (Score:3, Informative)
Plutionium is not the deadliest substance. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Science Today (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sorry, couldn't resist... (Score:2, Informative)
What you said is not quite right, in latin "unus" is 1, which you basically got right.
The problem is that "pent" is a greek prefix for 5, not latin. In latin 5 is "quinque", so 1-1-5 should be ununquintuim, if you wanted to stick with latin.
Re:area 51 conspiracy link to ununpentium (Score:3, Informative)
Could this be it?:
April 1969 (pages 57-67) issue of "Scientific American" by Dr. Glenn Seaborg
Discusses transuranics, #114 in depth, but includes others.
Re:Not the first doughnut element (Score:5, Informative)
But many nuclei are distended by orbitals with definite angular momentum, and many are distended into shapes that are not footballs. Disks are common. The nuclei of heavy elements like uranium are shaped like light bulbs, with a definite axis. The "bulge" in the bulb sloshes back and forth along the main axis, onto each side of the center of mass.
Re:anti-gravity pot theories be wary... (Score:3, Informative)
Brown tested his devices in a vacuum chamber at GE in 1959. The results are not publically available. However, the design he was working on at the time involved using a gas jet as the generator of the electrostatic charge as well as the carrier necessary to create the effect. If so, yes, it is an ionic flow effect, but this does not mean it's restricted to atmospheric use. His patent on this design is US# 3,022,430.
Re:They don't all have to end in 'ium' (Score:4, Informative)
Fluorine (you misspelled it, argh), chlorine, bromine, and iodine, and don't forget astatine all end in 'ine' because they are all halogens.
Argon, xenon, radon, and also neon and krypton all end in 'on' because they are noble gases.
The other oddballs you mention: hydrogen, oxygen, boron, carbon, silicon, nitrogen, were all named back when chemistry was a little less organized than it is today. However, there is still structure in their names: hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen are all gases, and the 'gen' implies that they are involved in the creation of some other substance. In the case of hydrogen, water. In the case of oxygen, acid (although this turned out to be incorrect -- oxygen has nothing to do with acidity).
Boron, carbon, and silicon are all solid, nonmetallic elements.
You'll notice that all the metals end in 'ium', except for those which have been known far before the advent of chemistry (gold, silver, iron, nickel, copper, etc.)
The vast majority of elements end in 'ium' because the vast majority of elements are metallic in nature.
Re:The Big deal with Element 115... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Science Today (Score:2, Informative)
It doesn't matter if they are completely stable, just stable enough to use, something which breaksdown over a thousand years is still useable.
I'm no physicist, but I think the instability is a direct result of the size of the element. The bigger they get, the more radioactive
More or less, but when you start looking at alot of these big elements you realize we don't know all that much about them, and so maybe one of these will turn out to be stable, as the article mentioned( although in very bad terms) there are certian numbers of particles which appear more stable, although we don't reaaly know right now, we're still smashing things together to see if something neat happens.
Re:What's the point ? (Score:5, Informative)
So I'm wondering - what's the point ?
Elements 83 (bismuth) and under have one or more stable isotopes, and one or more unstable isotopes. So, for example, hydrogen (element 1) is stable, but deuterium (H-2) and tritium (H-3) are not. Nevertheless, these unstable isotopes are useful. Deuterium is used in nuclear medicine, in heavy water for nuclear reactors, and in fusion reactions. So...
Myth: Unstable isotopes are useless.
Myth Busted!
Past element 83, there are no stable isotopes. There's a pretty good chart showing the stable and unstable isotopes here [europhysicsnews.com]. There's also an interactive one, color-coded for lifetimes, here [kaeri.re.kr]. The half-life of these elements decreases from millenia to microseconds. However...
It's been known for decades that certain numbers of protons are "magic" in that they "pack together" in a very stable manner. Same thing with neutrons. As we approach the next "magic" numbers, the half-lives of the elements should start going back up. And they do.
In this latest experiment, the particular isotope of element 113 *may* have lasted for as long as 1.2 seconds. That's a long time for such a heavy element. Elements under 113 last for much less time, so that shows that we may be reaching the region of stability.
The region of stability is apparently close by, and *stable* superheavy elements will assuredly have useful properties.
And that's why nuclear chemists continue to search for heavier and heavier artificial elements. Because one day one of them will last for more than a few seconds. And then one day, one of them will last forever. Instant revolution in materials science.
Myth: There's no point searching for superheavy elements.
Myth Busted!
--Rob
Re:Science Today (Score:4, Informative)
A heavy metals is any metal with a specific gravity higher than 5. Everybody knows the dangerous ones: Lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, plutonium, and uranium. But there are plenty of them that arn't dangerous.
Tungsten, Ruthenium, Palladium, Platinum, Gold, Rhodium, Osmium and Iridium are all heavy metals, all far less dangerous than lead, and all slightly denser to twice as dense as lead or mercury. Some lighter heavy metals include calcium, copper, iron, and zinc. And you need all of THOSE ones to live. (That's part of why heavy metals are toxic. They replace these elements in essential reactions within the body)
Besides heavy metals not always being toxic, an elements density is also unrelated to its atomic mass. Molybdenum's atomic mass is half that of lead, but they have close specific gravities.
Instead of freting over the effects on children of adding an element that hasn't even been discovered yet to paint, you should probably look into all the mercury that doctors inject into children every year.
What's the half-life? (Score:3, Informative)
112 is 240 microseconds.
116 is 47 milliseconds
Can we say they really exist, or should we call it rather a random aglomeration of electrons, protons and neutrons?
Saying they were created is just like saying jumping is flying.
Re:Not the first doughnut element (Score:3, Informative)
I refer you to the shell model of the nucleus. [gsu.edu] Maybe I should have called them "shells" and not "orbitals". Still, the nucleus is not a still life like a bunch of grapes. Each particle is moving around in a shell with an identifiable set of quantum numbers.
Oxygen has 8 protons, (for the most part) 8 neutrons and (in the stable state) 8 electrons - the electrons are arranged so that there are two on the internal 1s orbital then two in the 2s and four more in the 2p orbital - if this was filled it would have 6 and would then be an O(2- superscript) ion... the bit about orbit shapes would seem to refer to d and f orbitals but well I got a bit lost in the bs science.
Look, these are the nuclear magic numbers: 2,8,20,28,50,82,126. 2 is helium. 8 is oxygen. There is no point in arguing about it.
Re:Science Today (Score:2, Informative)
Deuterium is stable (Score:1, Informative)
Since deuterium isn't radioactive, it can't be used as a radiological tracer. Its use in nuclear reactors is because deuterium-laced "heavy" water (D20) is better at acting as a moderator for nuclear reactions. Normally, the neutrons produced in a reactor are moving too fast to cause a chain reaction. When they collide with light water, the hydrogen atoms absorb the neutrons and turn into deuterium. The deuterium atoms, however, simply slow down the neutrons without absorbing them, thus improving the efficiency of the chain reaction. That's why heavy water is useful for nuclear reactors.
Light water reactors are more common today, just because light water is slightly easier to get (heavy water is quite common in the oceans, but requires processing to separate the relevant isotopes), but heavy water reactors were important early on in the development of nuclear power, and they still have their uses today.
Re:Science Today (Score:3, Informative)
What you say about electostatic repulsion is mostly true. The binding energy of the nucleus generally decreases as the number of protons differs more from the number of neutrons, since protons and neutrons are separately subject to the Pauli exclusion principle. That is, a proton and a neutron can share an energy/spin state, whereas two protons can't, forcing one of them up to a higher energy level. That's the primary effect in lighter nuclei, keeping the number of protons and neutrons nearly equal.
As the number of protons becomes larger, and the net charge becomes greater, electrostatic repulsion between the protons becomes more of an effect: it grows with the square of the number of protons. Adding extra neutrons increases the radius of the nucleus, spacing the protons farther apart from each other on average and therefore decreasing the electrostatic repulsion.
Re:The Big deal with Element 115... (Score:3, Informative)