It will also not be the only element to be named after a country, having been proceeded by polonium and francium after the places they were discovered. The periodic table has been much debated, changed and improved since that time, but its essential nature has remained the same-despite the dramatic advances made in the scientific world over that same time period.
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Japanese scientists behind the discovery of element 113, the first atomic element found in Asia – indeed, the first found outside Europe or the United States – have dubbed it “nihonium” after the Japanese-language name for their country.
A joint team of Russian and US researchers also claimed to have created the 113th element. The International Union of Pure Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) is set to authorise the move to honour the team of researchers at the Japanese Institute on Science, who made the discovery.
If approved, it will join other newly announced elements: moscovium, tennessine and oganesson.
“We are honored to have the name of an element discovered by a research group in Japan earn a permanent seat on the periodic table, an intellectual legacy that will be passed down to future generations for the benefit of humankind”, he went on.
They selected Oganesson, symbol Og, for Yuri Oganessian, who helped discover several superheavy elements.
Learning more about the nature of the new element is a hard task, as it only exists for a five-hundredth of a second after it is created. The IUPAC awarded the naming right to the Japanese team as it clearly demonstrated the process of the element’s decays after synthesis.
Element 113 was created by scientists at the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science near Tokyo, Japan, so gets the name nihonium (Nh), which incorporates the word “nihon, ‘ one way of saying ‘Japan” in Japanese.
Morita told Kyodo News: “I don’t want to propose a name that will not be accepted by everyone”. Some 150,000 people signed a petition arguing that element 115 should be named “lemmium” after Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister of the heavy metal band Motorhead, who died in late December 2015.
About 50,000 Terry Pratchett book lovers wanted element 117 to be named “octarine”, and New York Times readers suggested “trumpium” and “godzillium” for the new elements.
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The new names are up for public comment for five months. Iupac has the final say on all names, however, and barring some large public outcry the organization is expected to make the names official in November.
