6 Things You Need to Know About the Periodic Table
There's a new element to join the periodic table.
A group of American and Russian scientists discovered an element in 2010, but it took four years of further research to verify it. An international team of scientists did it, at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany, making Element 117 one step closer (to joining the periodic table). No name yet, as the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) will have a look on it before giving the final nod.
"This is of paramount importance as even longer-lived isotopes are predicted to exist in a region of enhanced nuclear stability," explains Dr. Christoph Düllmann from the Institute for Nuclear Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.
Researchers made a few atoms of this element by shooting an intense beam of calcium ions into a target of berkelium. The discovery bolstered the notion of an "island of stability", a group of super heavy nuclei still out of reach. Hopes of reading that island of stability have increased with the new elements being cooked up in recent years. The Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia is credited for elements 113 through 116 and 118.
This brings to the periodic table and its significance. Here are six things that one must need to know about those columns of elements:
1. The periodic table is a tabular arrangement of chemical elements, substances made of a single atom, organized on the basis of their atomic numbers, electron configuration, and chemical properties. Atomic number refers to the number of protons in the nucleus of that atom of that element, while electron configuration is the distribution of electrons of an atom. A chemical property of a particular atom is its quality that becomes evident during a chemical reaction.
2. Dmitri Mendeleev, Russian chemist and inventor, is credited with the creation of the periodic table in 1869. It has been used to predict the properties of elements yet to be discovered.
3. The elements are put together in groups and periods. A group is a vertical column in the table, and there are eighteen numbered groups. The elements in a group have similar physical or chemical characteristic of the outermost electron shells of their atoms. On the other hand, a period is a horizontal column (in the table), elements of the same period having the same number of electron shells.
4. The ninety two elements that are found on Earth have one thing in common, which is they have been stable enough to hang around over the 4.5 billion years of the planet's existence. Those beyond the 92nd element, uranium, have shorter half-lives, having been manufactured in nuclear reactors or by particle accelerators.
5. As more were discovered, the trend seemed to be towards shorter half-lives as mass increased. But in the 1960s, nuclear physicists discovered that certain key numbers of protons and neutrons conferred extra stability on a nucleus. If there were such “magic numbers” larger than those seen in existing elements, perhaps some super heavy elements with quantities of protons or neutrons close to those numbers would last much longer, producing an island of stability.
6. In 2011, IUPAC announced the inclusion of Element 118, known as Ununoctium, into the periodic table. It was first discovered in 2002, but it took nine years to verify it. Elements beyond (Element) 118 have not yet discovered, which prompts some to wonder if the table may need to be altered if more are found. Time will tell.
