The Tesseract Project A blog of temporary obsessions

The growing periodic table

Nov 17, 2020

This morning I came across a note I made in 2011 that a new chemical element had been announced, and at the time, I wondered when the one before that one came. I hadn't heard about them any new ones in a long time.

Apparently I have just been missing the news. In fact, I feel like I've missed most of it since Bohrium (element 107, 1981) and perhaps since Seaborgium (106, 1974). I vaguely recall numbers up to around 105 or 106, but I don't remember ever hearing those names. It feels a bit embarrassing, especially since we're up to 118 (Oganesson, in 2002), although the most recent one is Tennessine (117, in 2009). (Names, numbers, dates are from the Wikipedia Timeline of chemical element discoveries, and of course that's a page that exists.)

The 2011 announcement I had noted was about Flerovium (114, originally discovered in 1998) and Livermorium (116, in 2000). They were both synthesized in Dubna, Russia, at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research.

There's too much to the story of element discovery even in the past decade to get into right now, but there are some interesting stories about the science, the people who did the work, arguments between chemists and physicists about elements, and the organizational details of accepting and naming new elements. Some approachable articles that go into various aspects of that are:

And the next ones may be more exciting, because new ones will suggest another row in the periodic table, and that implies some different chemical properties.