Recently, a team of physicists from Russia and the United States created a never-before-seen superheavy element in the laboratory. Right now, it’s known simply as “element 117” or “ununseptium.” The experiment was led by Yuri Oganessian, a physicist at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.

Sigurd Hofmann, a nuclear physicist in Darmstadt, Germany, told Science News that the results are “convincing.”

Those names for the element are not official. A new element doesn’t receive an official name until more teams of scientists can also make it in the laboratory. This stage of the scientific process, called verification, is important to make sure that the original experiment was not a fluke. Verification can take a long time. In February of this year, for example, element 112 finally received the official name “Copernicium,” and it had been first identified in 1996.

At the center of every atom is a nucleus, and inside the nucleus are particles called neutrons and protons. Each element has a characteristic number of protons, and inside an atom of the newly created element are 117 protons, which is why it is called “element 117.”

This illustration shows the newly found element that formed when berkelium atoms were bombarded by calcium atoms. See an animation of the bombardment.

From animation by Kwei-Yu Chu/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The new element was created at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in a machine called a cyclotron. A cyclotron may sound like a roller coaster — and for atoms, it is a wild ride. A cyclotron smashes together different kinds of elements at super-high speeds, and scientists watch to see what happens just after the crash.

In this case, the scientists used a cyclotron to bombard atoms of berkelium with atoms of calcium. Specifically, an isotope, or variation, of berkelium (berkelium-249) was bombarded with an isotope of calcium, calcium-48. The calcium isotope had 28 neutrons compared with calcium’s usual 20. Add that to the usual 20 protons in calcium, and you have calcium-48.

Berkelium is a heavy element that does not occur in nature — it also had to be created in a laboratory. In fact, berkelium was created in a laboratory in Tennessee, then transported around the world to Russia for this experiment.

And what an experiment it was: For 150 days, the scientists smashed calcium-48 atoms into berkelium-249 atoms, and at the end of the experiment the team had created exactly six atoms of element 117, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where some of the other scientists on the project work. And for all that work, those six atoms didn’t last very long: After a tiny fraction of a second, they had all decayed.

A heavy atom decays when its nucleus breaks apart, and the heavy atom breaks down into smaller atoms, each having fewer protons in their nuclei than were in the original hefty atom.

It may seem like the researchers went through a lot of work for six rare atoms that quickly vanished, but the scientists are excited. They’ve been looking for element 117 for some time — both elements 116 and 118 have already been made in a laboratory, but until now no one had seen element 117.

Almost all heavy elements decay quickly, but scientists are excited because superheavy elements such as 116, 117 and 118 don’t vanish as quickly as other superheavies. Scientists have been hoping to find a group of these atoms together. Such a group would be a step toward finding an “island of stability” on the Periodic Table, and element 117 may be part of the group.

Going Deeper:

Witze, Alexandra. 2010. “Superheavy element 117 makes debut,” Science News, April 24. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/57964/title/BREAKING_NEWS_Superheavy_element_117_makes_debut

Ornes, Stephen. 2010. “Heaviest named element is official,” Science News for Kids, March 15. http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/57303/title/FOR_KIDS_Heaviest_named_element_is_official

Ornes, Stephen. 2008. “The particle zoo,” Science News for Kids, June 25. http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20080625/Note2.asp

Witze, Alexandra. 2010. “The backstory behind a new element.” Science News, April 12. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/58239/title/Deleted_Scenes__The_backstory_behind_a_new_element

That new record is 4 trillion degrees Celsius (that’s 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit). By doing experiments at that temperature, scientists hope to study what happened just after the universe was born. Four trillion degrees Celsius is 250,000 times hotter than the hottest part of the sun, and probably close to the temperature of the universe right after the Big Bang, the birth of the universe.

The hot stuff is called a quark-gluon plasma, and scientists found it at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y. Using a giant instrument called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, the scientists zoomed two gold atoms through a ring that is 2.4 miles around and smashed the atoms together — and then watched to see what came out. There was so much energy in the crash that the atoms, in a way, melted.

Shown is a snapshot from a simulation of gold atoms colliding quickly enough to create high temperatures that “melt out” the quarks and gluons within, creating a quark-gluon plasma.

Brookhaven National Laboratory

As temperatures climb, most solids melt into liquids, and then the liquids become gas. (Some solids may go straight to gas if the conditions are right.) Ice becomes liquid water at 0º Celsius (32º Fahrenheit). At 100º C (212º F), liquid water boils into water vapor. Compared to other substances, water’s melting and boiling points are mild: Tungsten, a material used in light bulbs, doesn’t melt until 3,410º C (6,800º F).

That temperature is freezing compared to 4 trillion degrees C. At that temperature, atoms can break apart — and parts inside an atom can break apart — and then the tiny particles inside those parts can break apart. Think of an atom as a set of nesting dolls. When the largest, outer doll breaks apart, there’s another, smaller doll inside. And when that doll breaks apart … surprise! There’s another doll inside.

Similarly, at the center of every atom is the nucleus. Inside the nucleus are particles called protons and neutrons. And inside protons and neutrons are even smaller particles called quarks. Quarks are held together thanks to another kind of particle called gluons. (Gluons help to “glue” the particle together.)

The hot stuff produced at Brookhaven is a quark-gluon plasma and it spills out like a soup made of quarks and gluons. The quark-gluon plasma is a new type of matter that’s unlike solid, liquid or gas — but it kind of behaves like a liquid.

“We are extremely anxious to find out how this works,” Barbara Jacak told Science News. “Why is it a liquid?”

Jacak works at Stony Brook University in New York and is one of the scientists working on the project at Brookhaven. She helped take the plasma’s temperature. That was a difficult task because it’s hard to measure things that small. The plasma only existed for about one-trillionth of a trillionth of a second, and it was tiny, about one-trillionth of a centimeter across.

It was a very small piece of space that was super hot for a very short amount of time. In other words, you can’t just put a thermometer in it, Jacak says.

To take the temperature, the researchers watched it glow. A hot iron rod changes color from red to yellow to white as it heats up. In a similar way, the colors of light coming from the plasma changed. Based on what colors of light the soup emitted, the team figured out that the substance had reached the 4-trillion-degree record.

By studying these kinds of super-hot temperatures, scientists hope to learn more about how the universe formed. The quark-gluon plasma may look a lot like the hot and heavy goo that existed in the universe right after the Big Bang.

Experiments such as those at Brookhaven may help us understand what happened at the very beginning of the universe. But there’s a lot of work to be done, says scientist Chris Quigg of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. “These are very early days,” he told Science News. “Like many good observations, this opens up many questions.”

Going Deeper:

Sanders, Laura. 2010. “Hot and heavy matter runs a 4 trillion degree fever,” Science News, February 15. http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56379/title/Hot_and_heavy_matter_runs_a_4_trillion_degree_fever
Ornes, Stephen. 2008. “The Particle Zoo,” Science News for Kids, June 25. http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20080625/Note2.asp
Cowen, Ron. 2010. “New galaxies may be the farthest back in time and space yet.” Science News, January 30.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/52404/title/New-found_galaxies_may_be_farthest_back_in_time_and_space_yet

See the video and information from Brookhaven. http://www.bnl.gov/RHIC/physics.asp