• Question: What are scientists doing at the moment to potentially discover element no. 119?

    Asked by anon-213629 to Robert, Imad, Hannah, Fern, Christian, carolwallace on 9 Jun 2019.
    • Photo: Robert Ives

      Robert Ives answered on 9 Jun 2019:

      Spending massive amounts of money and using huge amounts of energy! There are very few research labs in the World who are able to even try and discover element 119 (if it exists). I don’t really know what scientists are currently doing (sorry) other than what can be read on Wikipedia, but perhaps the best thing they could do is to stop, wait for technology to catch up with the science, then try again when we have better methods of detection (perhaps once you have become a physicist)? If and when they do discover element no. 119, might they win a Nobel prize? What do you think?

    • Photo: Carol Wallace

      Carol Wallace answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      Great question – it’s takes lots of money, time and energy and it’s in the realm of the physicists. as computing power and availability becomes greater, I’m sure they’re getting closer. But these are really esoteric elements – they only exist for the shortest period of time and the search is really on proving the current thinking – and is it correct?

    • Photo: Imad Ouachan

      Imad Ouachan answered on 10 Jun 2019:

      Spending a lot of time and money firing elements together hoping they will fuse.

      A really cool article well worth a read – https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00285-9

      Taken from above ”If you wanted to create the world’s next undiscovered element, number 119 in the periodic table, here’s a possible recipe. Take a few milligrams of berkelium, a rare radioactive metal that can be made only in specialized nuclear reactors. Bombard the sample with a beam of titanium ions, accelerated to around one-tenth the speed of light. Keep this up for about a year, and be patient. Very patient. For every 10 quintillion (10^18) titanium ions that slam into the berkelium target — roughly a year’s worth of beam time — the experiment will probably produce only one atom of element 119.”

      Something that I didn’t know is that they don’t actually detect the super heavy element but only see the alpha and beta particles it gives off.

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