Peeking Deeper in the Mysteries of God's PeriodicTable....
And though I ..understand all mysteries, and all knowledge;
... and have not Love, I am nothing.
1 Corinthians 13:2
"The rare radioactive substance made its way from the United States to Russia on a commercial flight in June 2009. Customs officers balked at accepting the package, which was ensconced in lead shielding and emblazoned with bold-faced warnings and the ominous trefoil symbols for ionizing radiation. Back it went across the Atlantic.
U.S. scientists enclosed additional paper work and the parcel took a second trip, only to be rebuffed again. All the while, the precious cargo, 22 milligrams of an element called berkelium created in a nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, was deteriorating. Day by day, its atoms were decaying. “We were all a little frantic on our end,” says Oak Ridge nuclear engineer Julie Ezold.
On the third try, the shipment cleared customs. At a laboratory in Dubna, north of Moscow, scientists battered the berkelium with calcium ions to try to create an even rarer substance. After 150 days of pummeling, the researchers spotted six atoms of an element that had never been seen on Earth. In 2015, after other experiments confirmed the discovery, element 117, tennessine, earned a spot on the periodic table.
Scientists are hoping to stretch the periodic table even further, beyond tennessine and three other recently discovered elements (113, 115 and 118) that completed the table’s seventh row.
It’s been 150 years since Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev created his periodic table. Yet “we still cannot answer the question: Which is the heaviest element that can exist?” says nuclear chemist Christoph Düllmann.
For such outsized atoms, chemistry can get weird, as atomic nuclei, the hearts at the center of each atom, bulge with hundreds of protons and neutrons. Around them swirl great flocks of electrons, some moving at close to the speed of light. Such extreme
conditions might have big consequences — messing with the periodic table’s tidy order, in which elements in each column are close chemical kin that behave in similar ways.
Mendeleev’s periodic table, presented to the Russian Chemical Society on March 6, 1869, contained only 63 elements.
At first, scientists added to the periodic table by isolating elements from naturally occurring materials, for example, by scrutinizing minerals and separating them into their constituent parts. But that could take scientists only so far. All the elements beyond uranium (element 92) must be created artificially; they do not exist in
significant quantities in nature.
To fully grasp nature’s extremes, scientists want to know where the periodic table ends.
“Everybody knows at some point there will be an end,” Düllmann says. “There will be a heaviest element, ultimately.” The table will be finished when we’ve discovered all elements with isotopes that live at least a hundredth of a trillionth of a second."
ScienceNews
And though I ..understand all mysteries, and all knowledge;
... and have not Love, I am nothing.
1 Corinthians 13:2
"The rare radioactive substance made its way from the United States to Russia on a commercial flight in June 2009. Customs officers balked at accepting the package, which was ensconced in lead shielding and emblazoned with bold-faced warnings and the ominous trefoil symbols for ionizing radiation. Back it went across the Atlantic.
U.S. scientists enclosed additional paper work and the parcel took a second trip, only to be rebuffed again. All the while, the precious cargo, 22 milligrams of an element called berkelium created in a nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, was deteriorating. Day by day, its atoms were decaying. “We were all a little frantic on our end,” says Oak Ridge nuclear engineer Julie Ezold.
On the third try, the shipment cleared customs. At a laboratory in Dubna, north of Moscow, scientists battered the berkelium with calcium ions to try to create an even rarer substance. After 150 days of pummeling, the researchers spotted six atoms of an element that had never been seen on Earth. In 2015, after other experiments confirmed the discovery, element 117, tennessine, earned a spot on the periodic table.
Scientists are hoping to stretch the periodic table even further, beyond tennessine and three other recently discovered elements (113, 115 and 118) that completed the table’s seventh row.
It’s been 150 years since Russian chemist Dmitrii Mendeleev created his periodic table. Yet “we still cannot answer the question: Which is the heaviest element that can exist?” says nuclear chemist Christoph Düllmann.
For such outsized atoms, chemistry can get weird, as atomic nuclei, the hearts at the center of each atom, bulge with hundreds of protons and neutrons. Around them swirl great flocks of electrons, some moving at close to the speed of light. Such extreme
Mendeleev’s periodic table, presented to the Russian Chemical Society on March 6, 1869, contained only 63 elements.
At first, scientists added to the periodic table by isolating elements from naturally occurring materials, for example, by scrutinizing minerals and separating them into their constituent parts. But that could take scientists only so far. All the elements beyond uranium (element 92) must be created artificially; they do not exist in
To fully grasp nature’s extremes, scientists want to know where the periodic table ends.
“Everybody knows at some point there will be an end,” Düllmann says. “There will be a heaviest element, ultimately.” The table will be finished when we’ve discovered all elements with isotopes that live at least a hundredth of a trillionth of a second."
ScienceNews