Two new elements were officially added to the
periodic table this month. The elements were discovered years ago, but they
needed approval from an international committee before they could be placed on
the famous chart. We asked Ian Chillag and Mike Danforth, producers of NPR's Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me and
hosts of the podcast How To Do Everything, to
explore how the process works:
How To Make A New Element
For
starters, elements 114 and 116 don't occur in nature. So don't look for them in
your backyard. That's because they were made in a lab. Which may seem like
cheating, but that's how it's done these days.
We
called up Paul Karol, chair of The Joint Working Party for the Discovery of New
Elements, which gave official approval to the elements, to find out how the
process works. And he offered a great explanation that was really long and
complicated, so we'll summarize it thusly:
1. Smash together atoms of two
elements.
2. Hope their nuclei fuse.
3. If they do, you have a new
element. Congratulations!
Now,
before you go off smashing atoms together, please note that it's not as easy as
our incredibly oversimplified explanation makes it seem. With elements 114 and
116 in particular, the end product is tiny — and exists for less than a second
before it decays away.
So,
it's not like you have a chunk of metal to show off. Instead, you get pages and
pages of computer data from advanced sensors.
"These
two species combine perhaps once out of a billion billion collisions,"
Karol says. "That's a billion billion. The experiments usually last for a
month, and maybe they get one or two indications they've made something of
interest."
So
once you pull off your one-in-a-billion-billion shot, other scientists have to
check your work by doing it again. You can see how this process could take a
while.
Possible Names For New Elements
One of the rumored names for element 114 is Flerovium,
after Soviet scientist Georgy Flyorov.
Justin
Witte/TinyMarkers
Once
Karol's committee decides your element is legitimate, you get an invite from
IUPAC to give your element a real name.
Since
their discovery, elements 114 and 116 have been going by the placeholder names
ununquadium and ununhexium. And chemists have been gossiping about possible
names for the new elements.
As Sam Kean, author of The
Disappearing Spoon, a book about the periodic table, says, "From some
of the whispers I've heard, they're going to name one of the elements after a
scientist named Georgy Flyorov, and another after Moscow."
Chemist Ken Moody will likely be among the
first to know the new names. He works on the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratoryteam that discovered elements 114 and
116, in conjunction with a Russian team.
Moody
also coaches high school sports teams.
"One
of the players on my team named Hanna told me I need to name it Hannaium,"
Moody says. "And Nicole wanted it named Nicolium. No matter what it gets
named, there are going to be a whole lot of little girls that are disappointed."
More
Science Stories
An Old Dispute, And A Proposal
The
naming process can get competitive. During the Cold War, labs from the United
States and the Soviet Union both claimed to discover the same new element.
Scientists refer to the decades-long naming battle that ensued as "The
Transfermium Wars."
It was kind of like Star Wars, except
instead of Darth Vader and Chewbacca fighting over the fate of the galaxy, it
was the Russians and Americans fighting over whether to call an element
Kurchatovium or Rutherfordium. And there were fewer light sabers. Finally, in
1997, IUPAC stepped in, and Rutherfordium won.
(Why
Rutherfordium and Kurchatovium? Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born, Nobel
Prize-winning pioneer of atomic research. Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov was a
Soviet nuclear physicist who guided the development of the Soviet nuclear
program, from atom bombs to nuclear reactors.)
As
for 114 and 116, the official names haven't been decided yet.
That
prompted a question for Paul Karol: Could we be on the cusp of an era of
selling corporate naming rights to new elements?
"I
hate to say I can't envision it, because I've been surprised too many
times," he says, "and I've also heard the expression, 'Everyone has
their price.'"
So:
Pepsium? Viagrium? Grouponium? Or maybe the Tostitos Periodic Table of
Elements?
"Possibly,"
Karol says. "Unless Doritos gets there first, right?"
Producer Blythe Haaga contributed to the
reporting of this story.
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