[Merged] Naturally occurring element with atno 122 atwt 292

[Freethinker]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352980,00.html

[Cuddles]

Interesting. Not sure why they say it would mean rewriting the textboooks though. Finding stable elements where it's been predicted we will find stable elements seems to be confirming exactly what the textbooks already say.

[Freethinker]

Interesting. Not sure why they say it would mean rewriting the textboooks though. Finding stable elements where it's been predicted we will find stable elements seems to be confirming exactly what the textbooks already say.

Indeed. Can't publish a story like this in mass media without getting at least the context wrong. This is a perfect example of how science works and how the lay press misunderstands it.

[Rob Lister]

also, I think they got the name wrong. Should be unbibium.

I hope they further isolate it. Love to see the properties.

[Dr Adequate]

So, science proved wrong again, then.

http://www.re-discovery.org/per_table.gif

[Mojo]

So, science proved wrong again, then.


Yeah! Get US out of IUPAC (http://www.re-discovery.org/get_us_out.html)!

[Freethinker]

Yeah! Get US out of IUPAC (http://www.re-discovery.org/get_us_out.html)!

How did I NOT know about re-discovery.com? There goes the morning!

[Aitch]

IUPAC supports the use of Arabic (Muslim) Numerals.

:jaw-dropp

[fuelair]

Read the short version of the paper (link just under end of story) and commentary. Implies the estimate is 122, not a guarantee on that part.

[Madalch]

Interesting. I suspect it will be a long time before they can isolate enough of it to determine any chemical properties, but I wonder how they predict the electron configuration to be 8s2 7d 8p. What happened to the 6f shell, or the 5g? Why would the electrons enter the 8p subshell before the 7d is filled? Anyone have that issue of J Phys B?

[Yllanes]

Interesting. I suspect it will be a long time before they can isolate enough of it to determine any chemical properties, but I wonder how they predict the electron configuration to be 8s2 7d 8p. What happened to the 6f shell, or the 5g? Why would the electrons enter the 8p subshell before the 7d is filled? Anyone have that issue of J Phys B?

The familiar rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Electron_orbitals.svg) for the order in which electron shells are filled is not always correct. There are some well known exceptions: for example, a configuration ns1 (n-1)d5 often has less energy than ns2 (n-1)d4. This happens for atoms as common as copper or chromium.

For very heavy atoms the deviations from that rule may be even bigger, as in this case. This is caused mainly by relativistic effects. Good keywords to find more about this are Breit equation or Dirac-Coulomb-Breit hamiltonian.

[Ixion]

Little wonder. Fox News has probably never even heard of Glenn Seaborg.

[fuelair]

Interesting. I suspect it will be a long time before they can isolate enough of it to determine any chemical properties, but I wonder how they predict the electron configuration to be 8s2 7d 8p. What happened to the 6f shell, or the 5g? Why would the electrons enter the 8p subshell before the 7d is filled? Anyone have that issue of J Phys B?
The short answer - which I give my chem students - is that when an electron goes in an order you do not suspect it is still doing what it does correctly - for whatever reason, the place it goes to requires less energy to go to than the place it "should have" gone!!!:)

[Madalch]

The short answer - which I give my chem students - is that when an electron goes in an order you do not suspect it is still doing what it does correctly - for whatever reason, the place it goes to requires less energy to go to than the place it "should have" gone!!!
Well, obviously- I'm just surprised that the 8p subshell is so close in energy to the 7d/6f/5g orbitals.

[ben m]

Watch out for this paper---it's very likely to be wrong.

As an aside (just to give you a sense of the level of scrutiny needed), this is Amnon Marinov's third or fourth claimed discovery of a superheavy element---there's a 2007 paper claiming to see two heavy elements in an Au sample (M = 261 and 265), long-lived Th isomers in 2001, and long-lived Am and Bk isomers in 2000. As far as I can tell, none of these "results" have been cited or replicated.

This paper simply shows that there's a peak in a mass spectrometer spectrum. Such peaks are extremely common and there are a zillion non-new-physics explanations for them---mostly due to isomers (if you see an ion with a charge-to-mass ratio of 32, can you tell whether it is 32S+ ion or a molecular O2+ ion? or a doubly-charged NiH++?) but also due to beam physics (charge exchange, scattering, etc.); this is true in all mass spectroscopy, but triply true when you're running several milliamps of current but allowing yourself to interpret few-event-per-second signals. The authors of this paper have seen a bump in a spectrum with very typical-looking bumpiness; they've done unconvincing background subtraction of a very limited list of possible backgrounds.

In a nutshell, looking for new elements in an ICP-MS is like sending a blind man birdwatching with a defocused digital camera. If you're in Central Park and you want to get the ratio of goldfinches to bluebirds, you're more or less OK---your blind surveyor can take random pictures; you can count the blurry yellow blobs and the blurry blue blobs; you can measure the yellow/blue ratio and (within some large error) relate that to the goldfinch/bluebird ratio. (If a few of your yellow blobs were actually out-of-focus mustard packets, it makes your measurement somewhat wrong but not disastrously so---that's what the error bars are for.) If you see a greyish blob, though, you cannot announce that you've discovered a single Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, no matter how carefully you argue that Pileated Woodpeckers would never have produced that exact shade of grey.

Anyway, that's what ICP-MS is really used for: to look for known elements and isotopes, in the face of known interferences. If you know that a sample ought to contain lots of Osmium and a tiny amount of Iridium, it's reasonable to take the M=192 peak and call it Osmium, take the M=193 peak and call it "Iridium plus some OsH+", carefully subtract the OsH+ using past experience with this ion, and call the difference Iridium. It's not reasonable to go through the rest of the spectrum and interpret every single peak as new elements/isotopes/woodpeckers.

If you want to find a rare bird, you should show something more than a color-match in a blurry photo; if you want to find a stable isotope, you should show something more than a handful of clicks in a notoriously interference-prone ICP-MS.

[Tubbythin]

If this result were to be confirmed there'd certainly be a lot of work for nuclear astrophysicists. Namely finding out how the area of instability is bypassed.

[BenBurch]

If this result were to be confirmed there'd certainly be a lot of work for nuclear astrophysicists. Namely finding out how the area of instability is bypassed.

If you had this in quantity, a really teeny-tiny nuclear bomb would be possible because "stability" is only relative in the "island."

[RecoveringYuppy]

Isn't the article also wrong in claiming that uranium is still considered the heaviest naturally occurring element on Earth? Given the half lifes of plutonium surely some of it has been found in nature by now also.

ETA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutonium

[BenBurch]

Actually, I know of no naturally occurring Plutonium.

[Tubbythin]

If you had this in quantity, a really teeny-tiny nuclear bomb
Not at 1 part in 10 to the 11.


would be possible because "stability" is only relative in the "island."
Well to occur naturally now it has to have a reasonably long half-life.

[Macoy]

Is there a super-heavy ball bearing at the centre of the Earth?

http://arxivblog.com/?p=385

[INRM]

Wow, quite impressive!

[Alareth]

Dammit!!!

What am i supposed to do with all these laminated periodic table posters I just invested in?

[arthwollipot]

I like the name "unbibium" myself.

[jj]

If that's confirmed, that's way, way cool. I applaud the somewhat cautious presentation, with this kind of experiment, even the most careful researcher can find noise in data.

But if this is confirmed, this is very interesting, and also would seem to shake up the debate about where islands of stability are. It might even lead to some new understanding in particle or nuclear physics.

[Madalch]

Watch out for this paper---it's very likely to be wrong.
Sigh. Too bad, but at least you pointed this out before I pencilled "eka-Thorium" onto any periodic tables in the classroom.