Last December, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC, for its acronym in English) forced to amend the chemistry books by announcing that, officially now, four new elements should be added: numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118, discovered during the last two decades . If you have a periodic table at hand, they would complete the seventh line and are synthetic , that is, they are not found in nature. Provisionally, they were baptized as ununtrio, unumpentio, ununseptio and ununoctio, names at least cacophonic and practically interchangeable.
In the scientific community there was some expectation to know what definitive name the newcomers would receive, all of them very radioactive and ephemeral (at most they last seconds ). The same laboratories that manufactured them sent their proposals, under the premise that the name can only refer to one of its physical or chemical properties, to mythological, mineral, scientific, country and city concepts. And finally there is a verdict:
– Nihonium (113) was created at the Nishina RIKEN Center for Accelerator-Based Science, near Tokyo. Nihon is a way of saying ‘Japan’ in Japanese .
– Moscovium (115) obviously refers to Moscow, in homage to the scientists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) , located near the Russian capital, who collaborated in the finding.
– Tennessine (117) recognizes the work of the state of Tennessee , where the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Vanderbilt University and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville are based.
– Oganesson (118) recalls Yuri Oganessian , 83-year-old researcher at JINR who has been instrumental in discovering several superheavy elements .
In the absence of clamorous opposition to these candidacies, which is unlikely, IUPAC will approve the names of the four new elements in November .
