According to the Guardian, elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 were added to the table after their discoveries were verified in December. Those names: nihonium (Nh), moscovium (Mc), tennessine (Ts), and oganesson (Og).
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Now, these monikers are not set in stone yet.
The names will be subject to public review for five months before formal approval by the IUPAC council.
The IUPAC limits choices for elements names to mythological characters, minerals, places, properties of the element, or scientists – ruling out public calls to name an element after heavy-metal band Motörhead guitarist Lemmy, who died earlier this year.
LLNL teamed with JINR in 2004 to discover elements 113 and 115 (Japan was credited with the discovery of element 113). “Moscovium is in recognition of the Moscow region and honors the ancient Russian land that is the home of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, where the discovery experiments were conducted using the Dubna Gas-Filled Recoil Separator in combination with the heavy ion accelerator capabilities of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions”.
Accordingly, Moscovium is names after the Moscow region; Tennessine is named after the US state, where Oak Ridge and Vanderbilt University are located; Oganesson is named after the scientist Yuri Oganessian, a contributor to superheavy element research; and Nihonium is named after one of the ways to say Japan in Japanese “Nihon”.
Each name was proposed by the research team that created the element, and the names show that personal connection. Oganesson is only the second element to be named after a living scientist.
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Sorry, chemistry students, you’ve got four new names on the periodic table to memorize. But now that the elements’ existence have been proven, they’ll need new names as well. The article was first published on June 8, 2016.
