4 New Elements - Half A Year Later

It has been just over 6 months since we had heard of the identification of 4 new elements in the periodic table. Just recently the elements have been given proposed names. As a reminder, here's is some information about the four new elements which had their discovery confirmed in January of this year (2016)

Element 113 – currently known by its placeholder name ununtrium – is the first to be discovered in east Asia. It was created by Kosuke Morita’s group at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science in Japan, by firing a beam of zinc-70 at a target made of bismuth-209. The group first claimed to have created the element in 2004, but there was still some uncertainty at that time because of the instability of one of its decay products. They followed up these experiments with more convincing evidence in 2012.

Elements 115 (ununpentium) and 117 (ununseptium) were discovered by groups collaborating across three institutions – Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US. The Lawrence Livermore-Joint Institute for Nuclear Research collaboration is also credited with having fulfilled the criteria for discovering element 118 (ununoctium) in work published in 2006.

These will be added to the lower right-hand corner of the periodic table and proposed names will be as follows [according to proposals outlined on 8 June by chemistry’s governing body, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC)]: 

• Element 113 will be named nihonium (Nh)
• element 115 will be named moscovium (Mc)
• element 117 will be named tennessine (Ts)
• and element 118 will be named oganesson (Og)

References: [1] [2] [3] [4]