The periodic table's seventh row is finally filled as four new additional elements are added. The discoveries of the four superheavy chemical elements are by scientists from Russia, America and Japan. It has been verified by experts and has already been formally added to the table.
This is the first time elements were added to the table since elements 114 and 116 were added in 2011. The new discoveries were verified before 2015 ended last December 30 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, a US-based global organization that governs chemical nomenclature, terminology and measurement.
The Russian-American team of scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California produced sufficient evidence to claim the discovery of the new elements 115, 117 and 118, announced by IUPAC.
The discovery of element 113 is awarded by the body to a team of scientists from the Riken Institute in Japan. Kosuke Morita, who was leading the research at Riken, said his team now planned to explore element 119's unchartered territory and beyond it.
"To scientists, this is of greater value than an Olympic gold medal," Ryoji Noyori, former Riken president and Nobel laureate in chemistry said. In the coming months, the elements will be officially named by the teams that discovered them. Element 113 will be the first element to be named in Asia.
"The chemistry community is eager to see its most cherished table finally being completed down to the seventh row," Professor Jan Reedijk, president of the Inorganic Chemistry Division of IUPAC, said. The new elements can be named after a mineral, a mythological concept, a place or a country, a property or a scientist.
The four new elements were all synthetic and were discovered by slamming lighter nuclei into each other and tracking the following decay of the radioactive superheavy elements.
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