Element 118 created

I missed when they (mistakenly) announced this one the first time. The first man-made noble gas!

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/science/10/17/new.element.ap/index.html

Very interesting stuff, but what use is something like this? Honestly, no snark, just curiosity. So you made a new element that lasted for a millisecond, ok, but who benefits from something like this?

Think of it as Conceptual Art for us techno-geek types.

118 is a bit of a stop on the road to a theoretical “island of stability” beyond it, in terms of increasing atomic weight. Somewhere up there is a nucleus with a magic number of nucleons, which ought to have some interesting properties. No matter what this putative element looks like, just finding out what the real magic number (or “doubly magic” nuber, in terms of both protons and neutrons, since the number of the former is rather uncertain) is would be of great value to atomic physicists in honing their understanding of nuclear reactions.

118 by itself may not be such a big deal, even if confirmed, but it’s so incredibly difficult to generate these ponderous elements every little step forward is cause to celebrate.

It’s also difficult to observe them once created. You have to get some evidence of one or two atoms of the element, with a half life of a small fraction of a second – indirectly deducing what was there by the decay products that remain after the atom splits into two por more fragments.

Theoretical knowledge is its own reward.

In my opinion, of course. And in the opinion of lots and lots of other people.

Whereas lots and lots of other people see no value in information that has no practical application.

There is a rather significant philosophical disconnect on this matter.

I bet you could get a rousing Great Debate started. :slight_smile:

I currently have it in the reading cue for this morning.

I was going to suggest naming it Uselessium.

Are there hopes that eventually they’ll be able to make one that has a halflife long enough where they can actually look at the element, maybe hold it?

Maybe love it and squeeze it and hug it and call it George?

Yes. That’s the “island of stability” that Loopydude was referring to.

IIRC towards the right end of the period table, lighter elements are often gases while the heavier ones are solids, or liquid in one case. If the “island of stability” is reached, is it theoretically possible that the noble gas analogue there could be liquid or solid? The fact that 118 is apparently a noble gas makes me wonder how heavy it’s possible for a gas to be.

I really should have said “nuclear physics” instead of “atomic physics”. Electron energy shells in the latter being somewhat analogous to nucleon energy shells in the former.

SoP, I think anything of any weight can be a gas under the right conditions, though I doubt the phase diagram of element 118 can be inferred from its decay products.

This statement is a bit oversimplified. The boiling point temperatures (at atmospheric pressure) of the elements do not follow a smooth trend on the periodic table. Hydrogen is a gas at room temp, but it’s on the left side of the periodic table while carbon, one of the lightest elements by molecular weight, is solid at room temp and has extremely high boiling points at 3900°C in graphite form and 4827°C in diamond form.

The “lighter” elements (i.e. lower molecular weight) are at the top of the periodic table and they get “heavier” as one moves down and right with only small exceptions to the general trend.

Also, there is not just one liquid element at room temperature; there are two: mercury and bromine. Plus, galium has a melting point only slightly above room temp at 30°C and will melt if one holds it in his/her hand.

Being a “noble” element means all the outer electron shells are filled and therefore, with a few exceptions of highly oxidizing elements (like oxygen and fluorine), it won’t form chemical bonds with itself or other atoms, or otherwise display polar interactions in absence of an external field. So, assuming you had a quantity of it that was (somehow) stable and pure, 118 would probably look and act like a very heavy, nearly ideal gas, or a very inviscid liquid.

As for the utility of it, I can’t offer any concievable application of that knowledge. But the same could be said of many scientific discoveries that now find common application in modern technology. I daresay nobody thought of PET scans when Paul Dirac started playing with fermions, and surely Maxwell had no conception of compact random access magnetic data storage when he did his now-famous work formulating the laws of electromagnetism. That an area of research as no immediate application is insufficent call to damn it into oblivion.

Stranger