Officials who are studying the periodic table have approved the names of four new elements. The new additions are named after a country, three cities and a scientist. The new name for element 113, a highly radioactive element with an extremely short half-life, comes from Japan's name in Japanese - 'Nihon', literally 'the land of the rising sun'.
The Periodic Table
The periodic table is a tabular arrangement of the chemical elements, ordered by their atomic number, electron configurations and recurring chemical properties. This ordering shows periodic trends, such as elements with similar behavior in the same column. It also shows four rectangular blocks with some approximately similar chemical properties. Within one row, the elements are metals on the left and non-metals on the right.
The rows of the table are called periods; the columns are called groups. Six groups have names as well as numbers. The periodic table can be used to derive relationships between the properties of the elements, and predict the properties of new elements yet to be discovered or synthesized. The periodic table provides a useful framework for analyzing chemical behavior, and is widely used in chemistry and other sciences.
New Elements Complete, Asia's Periodic Table Entry Named After Japan
The Bureau officially approved the names nihonium (Nh) for the element 113, moscovium (Mc) for element 115, tennessine (Ts) for 117, and oganesson (Og) for 118, following a five-month public review, as reported by DW Made for Minds. "The element, named for the first time by Japanese and in Asia, will occupy a place in the periodic table - an intellectual asset of mankind," Kosuke Morita, who led the team that created the element, said in a statement.
According to Channel News Asia, some elements, such as hydrogen, carbon or magnesium, are found in nature while others, including nihonium - official symbol Nh - are synthesized in laboratories. All the discovered elements after 104 are synthetic ones produced through laboratory experiments. The periodic table, pored over by science students the world over, arranges chemical elements in the order of their atomic number.
CNN reported that Nihonium is an extremely radioactive, superheavy, synthetically-made element that Morita's research group has been working on since 2003. The group synthesized element 113 for the first time in July 2004, repeating the feat in April 2005 and August 2012. They used RIKEN national research Institute's heavy ion linear accelerator -- a particle accelerator that increases the kinetic energy of charged ions to produce reactions.
