Until now, these elements had temporary names and symbols on the periodic table as their existence was hard to prove.
Advertisement
The proposed names will be confirmed after a period of five months. The elements in question are moscovium, nihonium, tennessine and oganesson, which have been named after a team of researchers in Japan, Tennessee and Russian Federation.
The guidelines used to name elements follow a longstanding tradition of basing them after a mythological concept or a character, a place or a geographical region, a property of the element, a mineral or a similar substance or a scientist.
The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) gave the teams who discovered the elements permission to name them, with certain parameters to be met.
Element 113, discovered in Japan, is to be called nihonium (nee-HOH’-nee-um), reflecting one way to name that country in Japanese.
The elements are the first to be included in the famous table since 2011, and complete its seventh row.
Tennessee is the second US state to be recognized with an element; California was the first.
Element 118 – with Russian and U.S. discoverers, again – has a provisional name of oganesson, recognising Prof Yuri Oganessian. The Russian scientist pioneered contributions to transactinoid elements research.
His many achievements include the discovery of superheavy elements and significant advances in the nuclear physics of superheavy nuclei including experimental evidence for the “island of stability”.
The new element names will undergo a public review and should no objections arise, they will get formal approval. People have until November to object them.
Nihonium references the Japanese name for Japan.
“Although these choices may perhaps be viewed by some as slightly self-indulgent, the names are completely in accordance with IUPAC rules”, mentioned Reedijk. The other word, “Nippon”, made its way to versions of the periodic table in 1908 as element 43, nipponium, but was never officially accepted.
Advertisement
Until now, the quartet have been referred to simply by the number of protons in each atom – 113, 115, 117 and 118, respectively. Ryoji Noyori, a Nobel Prize victor said that it is a great matter of pride for the scientists who made the discoveries. Moscovium (Mc) is named for Moscow and Tennessine gets its name from the state of Tennessee. (A collaboration between the JINR, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, and the Oak Ridge laboratory, was credited with the discovery of these two elements).
