Names proposed for four new elements in the periodic table
Proposals are under way to name the four new additions to the periodic table, which were confirmed in December 2015 by International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC). The elements had been temporarily named as ununtrium, (Uut or element 113), ununpentium (Uup, element 115), ununseptium (Uus, element 117), and ununoctium (Uuo, element 118). IUPAC had asked the teams credited with the discovery of these elements to put forth proposals for the names and two-letter symbols for the same, and has now disclosed them for public review. According to nomenclature guidelines, the elements can be named after a mythological concept, a scientist, a place or country, a property, or a mineral.
According to IUPAC, element 113 is the first artificial element to be named in East Asia, and its discovery has been credited to the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science, Wako. While the earlier suggestion for this element when it had been discovered 12 years ago was ‘Japonium,’ the team has proposed the name nihonium and the symbol Nh. IUPAC elaborated that ‘Nihon’ is a way to say “Japan” in Japanese, and literally means “the Land of the Rising Sun.” The idea behind this name is to make a direct connection to the land where the element was discovered.
Elements 115 and 117 were jointly discovered by the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia; the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California; and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee. For element 115, the name moscovium and the symbol Mc have been proposed in recognition of the Moscow region in Russia where the discovery experiments were conducted. On the other hand, the research teams have proposed the name tennessine with the symbol Ts for element 117 in recognition of the Tennessee region which is home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The name proposed for element 118 is oganesson and the symbol is Og. This proposal is the most striking because the Dubna and Lawrence teams wish to pay a tribute to Yuri Oganessian, an 83-year-old researcher at Russia’s Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, for his contribution in the discovery of numerous superheavy elements. This is only the second time that an element has been named after a living scientist; the first being element 106, seaborgium, which was named after Glenn Seaborg, a US nuclear-chemistry pioneer.
The IUPAC Council will formally approve the names of the elements in November 2016 after a five-month public review.
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Published on: Jun 10, 2016
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