Discovering an element isn’t like it was in the good old days. Back then, you could isolate oxygen simply by burning a little mercuric oxide. Now scientists spend years using massive particle accelerators to smash barely-there specks of matter together. And in the one in a trillion chance the right pair of atoms happen to smash together and become one, what do the scientists have? Not a lump of unobtanium, but a bunch of computer gibberish saying the new atom managed to stay stable for a fraction of a second before decomposing into nothingness. Congratulations on your new element, kiddos.
So long to the days of the lone genius, too. It took more than 100 scientists—distributed across four teams in three countries—to discover four new elements, just added to the periodic table last week. Yet to be named, these four elements are so-called super-heavies, with nuclei so dense that they can’t exist in nature. This discovery completes the periodic table’s seventh row, or period, and puts researchers closer to reaching chemistry’s most fabled destination: the island of stability, a point at which a super-heavy element can exist on its own. But getting there means more particle colliders and more years of research—all with the added challenges of relativistic mechanics.
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