• Question: How come new elements are still being found?

    Asked by 536bera35 to Colin, John, Kevin, Shikha, Triona on 7 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Tríona O'Connell

      Tríona O'Connell answered on 7 Nov 2014:

      New elements aren’t so much found as made. Theoretically, you can always add one more proton to an atom to make the next element on the periodic table, in practice, it’s not that neat. You need to smash two smaller elements together to get the larger element and those elements aren’t all that stable. It gets harder and harder as the elements get bigger and fall apart faster. So new elements will be made very rarely from now on.
      On top of which, in order to get your newly built element recognised, you’d have to measure it to prove you made it and then do some chemical reactions to prove it is what you said it is (and has the properties to match). One of the later chapters in Philip Ball’s Elegant Solutions tells the stories behind some groups that are doing this new element creation, I’d recommend seeing if it’s in your local library.

    • Photo: Kevin Motherway

      Kevin Motherway answered on 8 Nov 2014:

      As Triona says smashing elements together at incredible velocities in particle accelerators can yield really heavy elements that are quite radioactive and want to lose their protons and break down to a lower number elements as soon as possible. Naturally occurring or “stable” elements you can find in nature go from element 1 hydrogen to number 98 californium. Above those numbers you generating elements that do exist out there in the cosmos but we can only create for very short periods in particle accelerators like the large hadron collider at CERN.

      The most recently recognised element is number 117 and unofficially they’ve gotten up to 119. One of the reasons scientists keep going is that there’s a theory that there’s an “island of stability” that they will eventually reach and that a super heavy element that is stable enough to stay around long enough for an awards ceremony will be generated.

      Some science like this might seem pointless as we can’t see the applications right now, but guess what else came out of CERN? A very efficient way for scientists to distribute data over computer networks, now known as…….the Internet.

      There’s an Einstein quote “if we knew what we were doing it wouldn’t be called research!” Here hoping that island of stability is out there at element 120?

    • Photo: Shikha Sharma

      Shikha Sharma answered on 11 Nov 2014:

      Hi 536 bera 35,
      As you know the atomic number of an element is determined by how many protons are found in the nucleus of an atom of that element. New elements aren’t exactly discovered anymore. But scientists rather create them using particle accelerators and nuclear reactions where they add protons to a existing element and produce new element. This can be done by smashing protons into atoms or by colliding atoms with each other. But these elements are generally unstable.

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