Texas Teach
Posts: 1588
Joined: April 2007
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| Quote (Henry J @ Mar. 28 2018,20:06) | I read that labs in Japan and Russia have recently started attempts to produce atoms of element 119, to be followed by element 120. I suppose they could do it in either order. They're both getting raw materials from ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratories), for one of the isotopes they need for this, the one that is itself an artificial element that has to be made in a laboratory. If successful this would start a new row on the table, giving it a total of 8 rows. (In school I was taught that it had just 7 rows.)
The article said that elements passed 120 may be beyond current technology, because their expected half lives are so short, and any atoms they produced would decay before they got in range of the detectors. Of course, all they detect for any of these really heavy elements is the decay products from nuclei that no longer exist when the decay products are detected, but still.
On interesting tidbit here is that for the last dozen or so elements added to the table, they can count the number of atoms that have been detected. |
Count them? They could name them.
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"Creationists think everything Genesis says is true. I don't even think Phil Collins is a good drummer." --J. Carr
"I suspect that the English grammar books where you live are outdated" --G. Gaulin
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