Some  call it the Island of Stability, a place like the wonderful kingdom of Prester John that Europe’s Medieval mapmakers placed somewhere beyond Armenia, or maybe Ethiopia, could be India. Only there was no such king or place. But the real, farthest East, when Westerner’s checked it out, did contain fabulously amazing civilizations. And there might be on the Periodic Table of elements an island of superheavy ones  beyond Plutonium, even beyond the flickeringly short-lived numbe2 112 Copernicium, with novel behavior. Its occupants may not be stable – but at least won’t be as insanely prone to spontaneous dissolution as are some of their lighter, human-manufactured elements. Thus to chemists and physicists it would be a wonderful place to explore.

Alrighty then – enter element number 117. Atomic scientists from the US and Russia say they cooked up six atoms of it, rather briefly, in a cyclotron at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna. They smashed atoms of  calcium (#20) into a tiny precious radioactive sample of Berkelium (#97) and got twinkling traces of a smidgen of self-destructing Ununseptium (add ‘em up: 117 protons. The name is temporary. It merely means element #117) that implied its implied half dozen representatives had lived longer than the trend of ever-less stable superheavy elements implies it would. Thus it’s a stepping stone to a long-speculated region, an Island of Relative Stability that was first imagined decades ago as an island of real stability. And who knows? Maybe it will be real stable.

One big news outlets and another prominent specialty agency got the news out right away, followed a cycle later by a few others.

Stories:

• New York Times – James Glanz: Scientists Discover Heavy New Element ; The hed might better have said they manufactured it – but it did take a lot of looking through the beam-collision debris to find the evidence. My “missing link” rash almost broke out on reading Glanz’s lede, but it makes sense in this context. It really was eagerly sought, and links are a lot like stepping stones. He has some nice quotes from a Lawrence Livermore chemist named Dawn A. Shaughnessy, who on searching around one finds did her graduate research 30 miles away at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, where berkelium first was made and where the cyclotron got invented. And the Dubna facility long has been Berkeley’s rival in the search for superheavies. So, while Glanz probably hadn’t room for such asides even if he’d thought of it, this result carries a lot of historic resonance.
• Science News – Alexandra Witze: Superheavy element 117 makes debut ;  The time ticks indicate Alex had the new out first. She says they actually got two isotopes of 117 – one that apparently has a half life of 78 milliseconds, the other 14 msec. Raised, she reports, are hopes for heavier things that might have half lives of seconds, or days, or even longer.

Later stories:

• New Scientist (blog) Rachel Courtland: Element ‘ununseptium’ to fill periodic table gap ; She has a good way to describe a payoff if the island exists, just sitting there in theory awaiting scientists to populate it and assuming not aliens have already done it far away. She says they may be stable enough to be “useful.”

UPDATES:

• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Get out the periodic table, kids! There’s a new element: 117 ;
• Ria Novosti: Russian, U.S. physicists together synthesize 117th element ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Lawrence Livermore scientists aid new element;

It’s not super duper atomic news because Elements 116 and 118 already have been briefly synthesized, if not yet formally given names other than Latinate renditions of their numbers. Thus the new #117′s ununseptium is just a post-it note pending a committee’s eventual production of a properly august monicker.  The news broke after Physical Review Letters accepted a paper on it for publication. (See comment below for more on that).

Grist for the Mill: Oak Ridge National Laboratory Press Release ;

Pic LLNL source,  unlabeled version  high def.

- Charlie Petit

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