14 DAY TRIAL // The General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP) announced on Friday, November 4, the names of chemical elements 110, 111 and 112, which have been included in the Periodic Table under provisional names for quite some time.
The elements are now called darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn), respectively. They are referred to as Super Heavy, or Transuranium, elements, and are unstable and short-lived.
In fact, they can only be produced in the lab, where they remain stable for only several fractions of a second, before decaying into more basic elements. As such, they are very difficult to study, and not much else is known about them.
These elements cannot be experimented upon, but their existence has been proposed through chemical models, and certified by experiments. Physicists are nearly convinced that the three chemicals do not occur in nature. If they do, they decay too fast for anyone to notice.
Element 112 – until recently called ununbium – was finally named after famous Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), the father of modern space studies. He was the one to suggest a heliocentric model for our solar system for the first time.
In other words, he is the one who created the first complex, comprehensive model of how the planets revolve around the Sun, rather than the star orbiting around Earth. His proposals led to the Copernican Revolution, which eventually gave birth to modern astronomy.
His name was proposed for element 112 by the head of the team that discovered the chemical. Researchers from the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research, in Germany, were led by Sigurd Hofmann, who made his suggestion in July 2009.
German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen (1845 – 1923) – the discoverer of X-rays – lends his name to element 111. The scientist won the 1901 Nobel Prize in Physics for his monumental findings. The element that now bares his name was temporarily called unununium.
Element 110 is now called Darmstadtium, due to the fact that the GSI facility is located near the German city of Darmstadt. All three elements were discovered by the same team, over the course of about 20 years of hard work.
The IUPAP General Assembly in the end agreed with the proposals the team made for the new elements' names. “The naming of these elements has been agreed in consultation with physicists around the world and we're delighted to see them now being introduced to the Periodic Table,” Robert Kirby-Harris explains.
He holds an appointment as a chief executive at the Institute of Physics, and is also the secretary-general of IUPAP, Space reports.